Race is not the only story of Barack Obama’s election, but clearly, it is one of its very important stories indeed. The election of Obama has so many levels and angles that it would take, well, an entire issue of _The New Yorker_ even to begin to sort it all out.
But if you are of a mind to immerse yourself in the racial context of Obama’s election, the racial forces that enabled Obama’s election—a topic that almost always was expressed indirectly during 2008, and almost always by design, on the part of Obama and his foes alike—you really can’t do much better than David Remnick’s “article”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/17/081117fa_fact_remnick?currentPage=all this week.
I have only one thing to add:
O to be in the room when Remnick and “Bunk Moreland”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunk_Moreland share a beer in New Orleans.

A couple of days after the joy of Election Day, I suddenly thought of Samantha Power, and was cheered. You see, I was very fortunate to see Power speak about Darfur and activism at the New Yorker Festival in 2007, and her address made a tremendous impression on me, as you can “see for yourself”:http://emdashes.com/2007/10/festival-samantha-power-is-com.php. (That post makes for interesting reading at this late date, actually.)
The thing is, in October 2007 Power was already entirely on board with the Obama campaign, a fact to which I made reference. She made light of the fervency of her advocacy for Obama; on a couple of occasions at the end of the session, she actually edited a questioner mid-query, so for example, if the question contained the clause, “what can the next president do—” she would hurriedly interject, “President Obama, yes, right,” and continue listening. It was funny, how committed she was, how obviously settled in her mind this question was.
It hardly needs saying that in October 2007, “President Obama” was a longshot—but maybe it does need saying that it was the early endorsement of people like Power that made him less of one. Then during the primaries she got in trouble for calling Hillary Clinton a “monster” and had to distance herself from the campaign (when her very involvement was such a strong indicator of the sterling quality of an Obama administration), and that was upsetting. Fortunately, by that time Obama was far enough along that people said, “Well, Obama can always appoint her later….”
I hope that happens. Power is one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever seen speak, certainly one of the smartest, and I sincerely hope that she becomes one of the most visible members of Obama’s cabinet—if not in a few weeks, then perhaps after 2012 (!).
But while I did think these thoughts in the last week, that’s not the reason I chose to write this post. You see, the TED conference has just posted a 23-minute video of Power delivering a speech about “Sérgio Vieira de Mello”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9rgio_Vieira_de_Mello, and alas! there is no existing video of that talk at the New Yorker Festival last year, so I thought it was high time to show all of you what I found so compelling about her.
“Enjoy”:http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/samantha_power_on_a_complicated_hero.html.

Jason Zengerle has a substantial “article”:http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/52014/ in _New York_ magazine on Malcolm Gladwell that’s pretty much a must-read for Gladwell enthusiasts. I very much count myself among that group, and I learned plenty.
In retrospect, the appearance of Gladwell on the national stage, around 2000, when _The Tipping Point_ first came out, had some similarities to the splash occasioned by our new president-elect, back in 2004. Like Obama, Gladwell’s genius is rhetorical in nature, and _The Tipping Point_ got as much attention for what it promised as for what it actually was, I think, and Gladwell became a kind of receptacle for his readers’ hopes in a way that Obama has, albeit on a much larger scale.
I recall attending the Gladwell’s 2004 New Yorker Festival event, held at that Times Square building with the curvy ABC News feeds slithering around it in green and amber; this was a couple of months before _Blink_ came out. Gladwell spoke about the shooting of Diallo and was riveting, I thought. The Q&A portion of the event was dominated by people who had read a galley of _Blink,_ and each questioner started, it seemed, by stating how “beautiful” or “spiritual” or “inspiring” the experience of reading it had been—odd words for a decidedly intellectual book.
That was some serious adulation being expressed there, and it makes for a tough act to live up to. I don’t think I’m speaking out of school when I say that the intervening years have not been a bed of roses for Gladwell, even as his bank account swells (amusingly, he claims not to know much about that). Critics have popped up (maybe they were there all along but feeling outnumbered), and there’s been a feeling that the books were perhaps too slight to warrant all the hoopla—Zengerle and Gladwell seem to adopt this line. _Outliers_ seems to have been written in this spirit; it’s described as more “personal” and “serious.”
Myself, I see the flaws in the first two books, but I also never thought that Gladwell was really setting himself up as the grand theorist everyone took him to be (of course, I was also intoxicated by his narrative voice; still am, I suspect). Once I was able to classify him as a kind of popularizer, a mantle he willingly adopts, then a lot of the criticisms came to seem churlish. Plus I didn’t see anything wrong with his focus on “mere” trends and marketing, as if such phenomena could not be handled with brilliance or insight or ambition. If he seems glib in retrospect, if the days before Iraq and Guantanamo permitted that kind of playful tone, that isn’t really Gladwell’s fault, and judging from Zengerle’s article it sounds like he’s sobered a bit, is after bigger game. I’m glad to see him taking on systems instead of those “mere” trends (even if I don’t share the need to dismiss), and I’m looking forward to the new book.

Whether you’re looking at the “Digital Edition”:http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2008-11-17 or the “dead tree” edition (the very phrase seems to plead for the invention of some sort of Virtual Interweb Way of reading _The New Yorker_), this week’s issue has a lovely cover, a Talk of the Town section crammed with items about Election Night and its aftermath, and four major features by David Remnick, Ryan Lizza, George Packer, and David Grann, about the campaign, the election, the president-elect, and what it all means. I’ll be taking some time out this week to comment on this or that aspect of the issue. It’s great to see _The New Yorker_ rise to the occasion.

David Remnick, Hendrik Hertzberg, Ryan Lizza, and host Dorothy Wickenden appear on the very last “Campaign Trail” “podcast,”:http://www.newyorker.com/online/2008/11/10/081110on_audio_campaign which went up yesterday. We know that Remnick was “in Chicago”:http://emdashes.com/2008/11/remnick-the-conservative-era-i.php for the big rally at Grant Park, and in the podcast he describes watching Obama from up close. Wickenden, having injured her ankle, gamely conducted the podcast by phone from her home—we wish her a fast recovery!
But most important of all, we now know the fate of “The Campaign Trail”! It will cease, as the campaign has and all good things inevitably must. The good news is that _The New Yorker_ will continue to provide a political podcast, known as “The Transition” for the next few weeks, until they switch yet again to “Days of Our Obama” or the like after January 20. I’m relieved!