WEBSTER BROOKS COMMENTARY: Barack Obama's "Purple Revolution" Faces Decisive Moment In New Hampshire

The black moderate and head of the U.S. Iran Peace Project emailed this commentary to Booker Rising. Mr. Brooks argues that Sen. Obama's presidential candidacy, which he supports, represents independent centrism:

Riding the headwinds of a stunning victory in the Iowa Caucuses on January 4, the fate of Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s crusade now rests in the hands of New Hampshire’s historically volatile electorate. Like most Americans, New Hampshire’s citizens have yet to grasp that Barack Obama’s campaign is more than a refreshing political enterprise, brimming with the sunny optimism and rock star media status. What is emerging around Barack Obama’s campaign is nothing short of a political revolution led by the only presidential candidate in either party who is not an ideologue, and the only candidate who understands that the American people’s desire for a new independent centrist leadership has arrived. Barack Obama’s “Purple Revolution” can potentially wrest control of American politics from the clutches of the extreme wings of the Democrat and Republican parties and invest power in the hands of a surging independent-minded majority that now comprises the nation’s new vital political center.

Barack Obama’s incipient “Purple Revolution” is not a matter of choice but of necessity. It is the only path he can take to win the White House and govern as President to bring about real change. That path dictates that Obama must first defeat the Democratic Party establishment, led by the dated ersatz liberalism of the Clinton dynasty and the black civil rights establishment. As the Democratic Party nominee, Obama would then have to defeat the Republican Party establishment that will close ranks behind its presidential nominee desperate to win the White House and cringing at the prospect of the GOP losing both chambers of Congress.

Heretofore, Barack Obama’s success has been powered by his fidelity to the concepts of hope, change and eschewing negative campaigning. His youthful appeal and newcomer status on the presidential stage is anathema to a political process mired in a cesspool of elitism. And his refusal as a black candidate to “game” racial politics has endeared him to white Americans. Absent any major campaign gaffes or an unlikely scandalous eleventh hour revelation, these political attributes can lift Obama to the White House. Ironically, the stealth revolution Obama is incubating dictates that once elected as President, he will have to lead the machinery of governance by resisting the left wing of the Democratic Party whose control of Congress will inevitably lead to an attempt to overreach and foist a liberal foreign policy and health care agenda on the American people. The success of an Obama presidency will ride on his ability to constrain Democrats and draw Republicans into his new centrist universe of post-partisan politics.

If Obama is elected President in November 2008, the colors of red and blue states will be increasingly blended into an elegant shade of purple. The continued erosion of the Democrat and Republican parties will be greatly accelerated and a new political re-alignment ushered into being by an Obama presidency. As a former independent Vice-Presidential candidate and avowed centrist, I was proud to endorse Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in January 2007. The ascendancy of the new centrist majority represents the next wave of American politics. Although Barack Obama is a Democrat, his growing Purple Revolution engenders the political thrust of everything true centrists have fought for the last decade against the special interests of both major parties.

The Ukraine had its Orange Revolution, Lebanon its Cedar Revolution and the former Soviet republic of Georgia its Rose Revolution. On Tuesday January 8, the citizens of New Hampshire can finish what Iowa’s voters began one week earlier by joining Barack Obama’s “Purple Revolution” and recertifying America’s credentials as an enlightened 21st Century nation.