Good morning, America

For the first time in our history, Michelle Obama and every other American from David Duke and Donald Rumsfeld to Michael Jackson and Jesse Jackson, woke up this morning with a black President.
Seriously, did you really think this day would ever come?
I bet those people who used to write to The Chronicle saying it was required of us as American citizens to always blindly support the President, even as George W. Bush and his handlers were misleading us to war, didn’t think it would. (And by the way, starting today, feel free to fairly criticize and the critique President Obama’s decisions and policies, because as we used to say in elementary school, it’s a free country.)
For a long while, it was hard enough to imagine waking up without Bush as President. We’ve learned that eight years can be an eternity.
It kind of felt like the person you really didn’t want to invite to the party was the first to show up and the last to stumble out the door, finally getting the hint to leave after he ate all your chips, choked on all your pretzels, borrowed 10 trillion bucks, spilled your grandpa’s ashes and made out with your sister.
OK, that last one was probably Bill Clinton.
But this is a new era, and we’re supposed to forget about the past and think only of the future and the current problems we must solve. Quickly, please.
Just allow me to reflect for a moment. Exactly 700 days ago, or one year and 11 months ago, I officially announced Barack Obama as my choice for President of the United States. I say this because I want you to know that I can pick a winner and because it demonstrates, I think, that I’m a genius. And also because it shows deep down inside, I did believe we were good enough as a nation to get to this monumental, definitive moment.
The idealistic part of me, the part that believes in the greatness, capability and potential of America and gets a lumpy throat (without the aid of carcinogens) reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, knew we had it in us to elect the bi-racial son of a Kenyan Muslim to be the leader of the free world, and for that matter, our little old country, if he was the best person for the job.
I knew we had the conscience to finally make good on the vision offered in our most important poems, our Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
Barack Hussein Obama’s election has made that romantic American part of me much, much bigger, but not so big as to think that all of our racial problems have been solved because 52.9 percent of voters went Democratic in 2008.
Last week, The Chronicle’s editorial on the historic nature of Obama’s inauguration quoted an educational website that managed to overstate the effect of his election as the 44th President of the United States of America. It claimed that “A race of people once exploited and taken advantage of has now taken an equal place in American society.” I hope that’s not what they’re teaching in school today.
The election of a charismatic, amazingly gifted politician by a relatively small margin considering the current political and economic climate in the U.S. may be a huge Hail Mary in the absolution of our nation’s original sin of slavery, but it cannot cure the ails created by 400-plus years of systemic racism and inequality. I hope we’re not too naïve to believe otherwise.
As my commentating colleague and fellow Indiana University alum Tavis Smiley said on last Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Obama’s election is “a down payment on King’s dream, not the fulfillment of King’s dream.”
Today, on the first full day of Obama’s presidency let’s resolve to remember that, and just how great we can be.