This optimism is not a naïve one.  As Obama has constantly repeated, "hope" in his understanding is not pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking, but rather a commitment, almost an existential commitment, to belief in the "better angels of our nature" despite our full realization of the many challenges to any worthy cause, and the many imperfections of our own nature that we have yet to overcome.  Yet the driving force of the Obama campaign is the belief that, if we do come together, a dynamic solution to our problems is indeed possible.  Change is thus not just a slogan, but fundamental to the campaign's premiss.  It is only if we can change (in the Sixties we might have said "revolutionize") the way we do politics, the way we approach each other, and other societies, only if we can replace the adversarial, zero-sum game, "gotcha" politics that has perverted and made stagnant the American political process these last decades, that we can really start with truly solving our many problems.  In that sense the one thing that Obama and his campaign really is up to fighting against is the old politics where fighting is the be all and end all of the process.

From the start, and still now, the position of the Obama campaign has been that they are beyond all that, that they are in the business of transcending the old divisions and divisiveness of the American political scene.  In this they show themselves to be both a movement emanating from a new generation (Obama at 46 is a post-babyboomer), and aimed at an even newer generation (the students, and youth generally, who have been such a central and vital part of Obama's success).  Their aim is not to settle old scores, but to get beyond all that, not get locked in the past but - having taken full note of it--transcend it.  It is at times a strangely self-conscious movement, one in which spontaneity sometimes looks as though it comes pre-packaged, as with so much in our self-referential, post-modern age.  Yet its yearning to look forward, and its willingness to have confidence in the future, to have the confidence to move beyond the inadequate political structures of the present to something more positive, more affirmative, and more suited to the future challenges that await us, remains deeply attractive.  And it is, I think, a potential new synthesis that will, if the road is indeed taken, bring us beyond the conflicted heritage of 68. 

Obama is, in the end, the one candidate in this election, who is a candidate of 2008, not some previous era.  For those who, to paraphrase Lennon and McCartney, do "want to change the world", he is the one candidate who can finally bring the demons that were unleashed forty or more years ago not to rest but to a more positive, beneficial and benevolent situation.  The final irony is, given Obama's African and American heritage, his election could well be the most fitting way to bring full circle an era in American history that began with a Civil Rights movement for African-American liberation and equality.  Or perhaps it is that, in transcending the conflicts of the Sixties, Obama's success will finally be enabling the best impulses of that era to achieve the goals that events and the internal logic of the movement then so cruelly frustrated?  In overcoming 68, Obama will be realizing 68.  Ann Dunham would be extremely proud of her son if that were the case.