So, how far can a nation progress in 40 years?

With the remembrance today of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., assassinated 40 years ago in Memphis, the mind reels to the 1960s when the nation finally confronted its failure to fulfill the promise of "liberty for all" and, with historic legislation, addressed the inability of black Americans to cast a simple vote in many places. And not until the Sixties did Americans begin, with baby steps, to adequately address the equal rights due to women.

Yet not until the presidential campaign of 2008 has a major political party reached the point of nominating either an African-American or a woman for the presidency. And the rhetorical roughhouse of this campaign has served to remind is of how far the nation has come since the Sixties, and yet how far it still has to go.

For all the talk of polarization in the campaign underway, it was the Sixties when radical meant radical. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his supercharged rhetoric on race and power, Barack Obama has reminded us, are products of the Sixties. The campaign underway still holds a potential for electing a woman, Hillary Clinton reminds us. Clinton herself is a successor and spouse of the first president to appoint a woman attorney general, Janet Reno, who, after graduation from Harvard Law School in 1963 could not obtain a job in a downtown Miami law firm.

And symbols of the Sixties keep flashing on our screens: "Hanoi Jane" returned this week with the off-the-cuff and probably ...

unintended "endorsement" that Jane Fonda handed Obama in a drive-by question, reigniting in these pages the fervor of the fight here at home over the war in Vietnam.

Even the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party, John McCain, is carrying us back to Vietnam this year. McCain, a Navy pilot whose airplane was shot down over Hanoi in October 1967, during his 23rd bombing run over North Vietnam, and who spent five-and-a-half years in captivity and torture, has replayed for voters in this campaign the image of that young prisoner-of-war who returned home physically broken but a stronger patriot.

Today, McCain and Clinton are making campaign appearances in Memphis for the commemoration of the civil rights leader who had "a dream," in part, "that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.'"

It's worth noting that when King was shot on that Memphis balcony, McCain was a prisoner-of-war. Clinton was a junior at Wellesley College, active in campus protests over the war in Vietnam and in the anti-war presidential campaign of Eugene McCarthy. She had had been elected president of the Wellesley College Government Association earlier that year.  Obama was six years old and living in Indonesia, where his mother moved after remarrying.  He would go on to graduate from Harvard Law, becoming the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Today, Obama is making a campaign appearance in Indiana, nor far from the city where Robert F. Kennedy stood on this day 40 years ago to inform Indianapolis that King had been slain and make a plea for peace. Kennedy, too, would be dead within months, assassinated, another victim of the tumult that we remember today simply as "the Sixties."

So, for this one day today, let Obama, Clinton and McCain take us all back and remind us of where we’ve been. But more importantly, let the campaigning that remains this year carry us to someplace new, with a more fulfilling answer to the promise that so many voiced, and died for, in the Sixties.

-- Mark Silva

Mark Silva of the Chicago Tribune's Washington Bureau writes for The Swamp.

Comments

[dave]

both mccain and clinton want to glean of mlk's fame - which is a shame. especially since they never did, and cannot now be seen to, make any sincere endeavors to bring about what mlk expressed in the quoted words, "that one day this nation will rise up and live out both mccain and clinton want to glean of mlk's posthumous fame - which is a disgrace. especially since they never did, and cannot now be seen to, make any sincere endeavors to bring about what mlk expressed in the quoted words, "that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.''
both mccain and clinton can be seen to have the same credo: 'all are created equal. some more so than others' ('some' including themselves, of course); and the cynical attitude that 'all are equally worthless and rightless.'
and that is not the spirit of the constitution. clinton and mccain would be well advised to stay away from it if they can't help but befoul it.