Toni Morrison endorses “Obama for America”
By Karen Juanita Carrillo

Major corporate media were surprised when Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses on January 3, 2008.  

But, besides the media, the one person who was probably the most surprised by the win was his number one challenger for the Democratic Party nomination, Hillary Clinton.

Since then attacks on Obama have come by way of both the media and Clinton campaign.  And yet the Illinois senator was able to win his second major victory, by taking 55 percent of the vote in the South Carolina Democratic primary on January 26, 2008.

And now Barack’s “Obama for America” themed campaign is even gaining more leverage, as it has won influential endorsements from Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison; from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.); from Ted’s son, the current Rhode Island Democratic Party Rep. Patrick Kennedy; as well as from Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the thirty-fifth president of the United States, John F. Kennedy.

“We want a president for those who still believe in the American dream and those around the world who still believe in the American ideal,” Senator Ted Kennedy said at a rally with Obama at American University in Washington, D.C.

“There was another time, when another young candidate was running for president and challenging America to cross a New Frontier. He faced public criticism from the preceding Democratic president, who was widely respected in the party. Harry Truman said we needed ‘someone with greater experience’—and added: ‘May I urge you to be patient.’ And John Kennedy replied: ‘The world is changing. The old ways will not do…It is time for a new generation of leadership.’

“So it is with Barack Obama:  He has lit a spark of hope amid the fierce urgency of now.”

The Kennedy endorsements were enough of a coup, but the moral weight of Toni Morrison’s support gives Obama’s campaign a special imprimatur.
 
This is Morrison’s first official presidential endorsement; it’s the first time Morrison has been willing to attach her name to the political promises of a presidential candidate.

Toni Morrison – who received the Pulitzer Prize for her 1987 novel BELOVED and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 – is known for her use of literature to explore the emphasis of justice and decency on the lives of African Americans, people who suffered the indignities of slavery, Jim Crow and racism yet must still negotiate a place for themselves in U.S. society.

Just last week, CNN's Joe Johns reminded Obama that in an October 1998 New Yorker article, Toni Morrison had termed Clinton America’s “first Black president.”

That comment may have helped push Morrison to write her letter to the presidential candidate:

“In thinking carefully about the strengths of the candidates, I stunned myself when I came to the following conclusion: that in addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don't see in other candidates. That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom,” wrote the current Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Princeton University.  

“It is too bad if we associate it only with gray hair and old age. Or if we call searing vision naïveté. Or if we believe cunning is insight. Or if we settle for finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree in the forest while ignoring the poisonous landscape that feeds and surrounds it. Wisdom is a gift; you can't train for it, inherit it, learn it in a class, or earn it in the workplace--that access can foster the acquisition of knowledge, but not wisdom.

“When, I wondered, was the last time this country was guided by such a leader? Someone whose moral center was un-embargoed? Someone with courage instead of mere ambition? Someone who truly thinks of his country's citizens as ‘we,’ not ‘they’? Someone who understands what it will take to help America realize the virtues it fancies about itself, what it desperately needs to become in the world?

“Our future is ripe, outrageously rich in its possibilities. Yet unleashing the glory of that future will require a difficult labor, and some may be so frightened of its birth they will refuse to abandon their nostalgia for the womb.

“There have been a few prescient leaders in our past, but you are the man for this time.

“Good luck to you and to us.  --Toni Morrison”