In God's world, everyone wins

After two long years of relentless campaigning and punditry and heated hearthside conversations, Barak Obama has been elected the next President of the United States of America.

Timm would have been happy. I knew, vaguely, that he was for Obama in the primary season; Oregon's was not until May but he was receiving emails from the Obama campaign in 2007, long before there was any certainty about his chances to win the Democratic nomination, much less the Presidency. When we were out in Oregon in April for Timm's memorial service, the Pennyslvania campaign was being waged, won by Hillary Clinton; it was a state which John McCain later gambled on and lost, decisively, to Obama last night, the Democratic get-out-the-vote machine doing a remarkable job of turning Obama's lemons into lemonade in that blue-collar state.

Dad and brother Will both voted in Pennyslvania yesterday and I wonder what the mood was, how long the lines. When I was up there in September, Will had commented that for one could drive for miles and never find a single Obama yard sign amid all the ones for McCain. Another miracle of modern get-out-the-vote was his victory last night here in Florida. After the experience of the 2000 and 2004 elections, I think the Democrats figured out the sort of dedicated effort which would be required ... We have early voting in Florida, and it seems that the Obama campaign worked hardest in getting out the early vote, and those numbers made the real difference here.

However, the true hero of this election, in my book at least, was Mom, working the polls yesterday over in Callahan Shores, an all-black district. A long, long day for her -- 6 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. When we had lunch last Saturday, she said she didn't relish the thought of coming home from such a long day to receive the news that her Republican party had lost. I thought it would be very close here in Florida, and we agreed to call each other this morning to offer congratulations or consolation, one to each of us though we weren't sure who would get which. Sorry Mom. And thanks for being a true citizen.

Obama won the Oregon primary in May, and around 11 p.m. last night, soon after the last polls closed, he was declared the winner in Oregon along with California, Washington and Hawaii, giving him enough electoral votes to pass the 270-vote threshold and win the office.

President-elect Obama in Grant Park last night.

As I said, Timm would have been happy. But I suspect his mood of jubilation would have been tempered like mine, knowing the challenges that face whoever inherits the White House in this terribly troubled season of our history. Very hard work to accomplish, and successes may be greatly tempered and hampered by conditions which may prove insurmountable for the sort of political decision-making machine we have allowed to fall into such disrepair. As much as I like him, I know Obama is no saint -- a man who inspires hope, perhaps, but has become much ground down by the hampering necessities and concessions anyone has to make to achieve major power in this country. (He began, after all, as a Chicago politico, and our family grew up in the faulty bosom of that machine.)

I'm sorry I don't have Timm to talk to about the long election season. Surely the jubilation in Democratic Congresswoman Hooley's office will be tempered today by his absence, a guy who perhaps embodied as good as anyone the hope and good-will inspired by the imagination of Obama's vision, regardless of what the man's realities will be. If Timm had made the decision earlier, he might himself be a new congressman, voted in to replace Hooley in her district, himself headed to Washington to join the difficult work ahead facing our country.

How different the scene in Grant Park last night in Chicago, where 100,000 supporters showed up to celebrate Obama's victory, than in 1968 when things got so ugly there during the Democratic convention. Dad was down there, or rather in the Republican watchdog committee's hotel room across the park with his pal Don Rumsfeld (then an Illinois congressman); tear gas floated up from the mayhem in the park and they had to shut all the windows. Meanwhile, staff from Dad's office were down in the park getting clobbered by nightstick-wielding cops of the Richard Daley political machine. It was not a good time to be black or radical in Chicago; we kids saw the evidence of that on that night watching TV in our big house in Evanston, the suburb closest to the violence. We watched in real-time black-and-white scenes of demonstrations turning ever uglier and violent. Timm would have only been four or five years old, and I don't recall if he was sitting nearby watching any of that, eyes wide, sucking his thumb, or if he was already in bed; but the vibe of ugly violence was heavy on our house that night, and his pathological dreams may have become infected in part by that mood.

Police and demonstrators in Grant Park, 1968.

I'm sorry that another Tim - Russert - couldn't be one of pundits on TV last night as all this was going on. Passionate and intelligent and prescient, Russert was truly an overseeing soul of our politics. His death by heart attack this year was eerily similar to our Timm's and is as much of a loss to our country as Timm's was to our family. Russert would have some great things to say about the current scene in Grant Park, about the changes that have occurred in our American society since 1968.

Tim Russert of MS-NBC News, host of "Meet the Press" and endless polticial enthusiast. Russert died of a heart attack very similar to Timm's last June at age 58.

I don't think this election represents a major sea-change in our politics; the electorate simply shifted a few percentage points the other way. A huge half of us has an alternate enough vision of our country and its future to cast a palpable pall over today's mood. American mandates are always divided ones, and the division in our country, I believe, will only widen more painfully in the years to come. There is a sadness to that which greatly tempers any hope I feel for the future.

But the lysis to this sleepy, somewhat migrained post is this: the political mood which has so affected and disaffected our country these recent years dispels quickly, returning us to something far less divided. Our daily reality, our loves, our work, our passions, have only tangential contact with our divisive politics.

Timm would whole-heartily agree with this: We are all God's kids. There is an eerie calm this morning in the cool darkness, neither elated nor dejected, for here, in God's world, everyone is equally loved and nurtured, Democrats and Republicans, cats sleeping under houses and coyotes padding silently nearby, crescent moon and garden in November.

Timm is gone, but the legacy of his photos offers us a whole-hearted look at that world which is God's in which we all share whether we know it or not. After all the clamor and anger and bitterness and infinite punditry, after all that expense (five billion dollars spent on elections this year -- twice the total of the '04 election), after all the months of nervous and passionate talk over coffee in the morning with spouses co-workers and friends, I go outside this morning to feed Mamacita on the front steps and so much is so quiet and perfect and still, deeper and older and wiser than our faulty human story with its endlessly difficult wounds.


God's world is always here and now, perfect and beloved and profoundly real: it was here last night at 7 p.m. when the first polls closed and the question of our nation's future loomed over us; it is here this morning when that question has been answered only in a political sense. I recall an AA oldtimer who used to always end his comments with this saying: "I don't know what the future holds, but I do know who holds it." In God's world we are all home and beloved and free.

As of this hour -- 5:45 a.m. -- the Oregon senatorial race still hangs in the balance, as does the one in Minnesota; North Carolina and Indiana have yet to cast their final lot for president. It's over in the big sense, yet its never over. I'm sure that it won't be long before the Republican party begins their long trudge toward regaining Congress and the White House. Our economy has even further to fall, and we may be entering a depression on a scale of the 1930s. Difficult times truly ahead.



Yet in God's world, everything's OK. Timm, born three years after our new President, finished his work in our world in the same year that Obama truly begins his. Yet Timm lives on, full-time, in God's world, where death is but an illusion. With all of the dramatic news of this year, Timm fades quickly from our world; my amends to him, the brother I mostly forgot, is, in a small way, Remembering Timm. I sing of him here so that he can still be found among us out there. His pictures (more of which I include today) are really postcards from that place, a greeting and welcome to all of us who would pause and linger in the moment, petting an aging cat as she feeds, walking in the day's cloudy breeze, allowing our gaze to be filled by a single perfect flower half in sunlight, beaded with dew, fully opened with Timm's smile.