Ivory Tower

Michelle Obama has every reason to be proud.

Our next first lady took plenty of heat in February when she addressed a campaign rally for her husband about him being the first person of color who was accepted as a serious candidate for the presidency.

“For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country,” she said.

Pro-Republican pundits went to great lengths to ridicule Obama, suggesting that she was ashamed to be American. Unfortunately, neither she nor her husband Barack, already known for his eloquence, was able to find any clearer way to express her feelings.

Of course, she didn’t have to. Everybody knew exactly what she meant, and everybody knew the truth behind it.

The Limbaughs and O’Reillys can bray until they’re blue in the face, but all minorities knew the sad truth. All our lives we’d been told — by public figures, by teachers and counselors, even by our own parents — that we could grow up to be anything we wanted, even president of the United States. Those words sounded great in theory. But as long as every president, and every person nominated by a major party, was a white guy, those words rang hollow.

My college macroeconomics professor gave us a list of laws to clarify the difference between theory and fact, to separate belief from reality. At the time they seemed like such no-brainers that no one really thought much about them. “If you see something, then it exists,” one law stated. “If it happened, then it must be possible,” was another. “Until it happens, it hasn’t happened,” was another.

We were told we could be president, but nobody like us had ever made it. The promise hadn’t been proven, and even those who believed didn’t really know if it was possible.

It’s human nature to emulate those who are most like us. I’m old enough to remember the sensation Mexican race walker José Pedraza made at the 1968 Olympics when he won the silver medal in front of his home crowd; it was the host country’s only medal. Afterward people could be seen waddling all over Mexico, inspired by Pedraza’s feat.

That inspiration paid dividends — Mexico’s Daniel Bautista won the gold medal at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, and Bernardo Segura finished first at the 2000 Games in Sidney, but was disqualified for not maintaining the strict form required in the event.

As a fat kid growing up in the 1960s, I made heroes of Washington quarterback Sonny Jurgensen, Detroit pitcher Mickey Lolich and other portly players. If they could do it, there was hope for me. Without their example I might never have been motivated to play those sports in school.

Many Americans could find no such heroes in the historically homogenous political world, however. To aspire to be president was to test an unproven theory.

It was time for a barrier to be broken, and many assumed that it would be the gender barrier. Hillary Clinton even declared that her ascension to the White House was “inevitable.”

Her declaration seemed logical just a few months ago. Clinton was taking the next step on a path that Frances Farenthold, Geraldine Ferraro and Elizabeth Dole had begun.

Farenthold, a Texas legislator known as Sissy in her home state, was the first woman formally considered for a major party ticket, when she placed second in the vote to be George McGovern’s running mate at the 1972 Democratic Convention. When the top pick, Thomas Eagleton, was removed due to publicity over his past psychiatric treatment, McGovern bypassed Farenthold and chose a member of the Kennedy clan, R. Sergeant Shriver.

Ferraro made the Democratic Party ticket as Michael Dukakis’ vice presidential nominee in 1988, and Dole, a Republican, was the first seriously considered female presidential candidate. Dole was second in national polls in 2000, behind eventual president George W. Bush, and third in the Iowa straw poll behind Bush and Libertarian candidate Steve Forbes when she ended her campaign just before the primaries.

No African American had made it even to the first step. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton had launched campaigns, but their activist backgrounds had made both polarizing figures and thus long shots for major party nomination. Black Americans had no leader with a viable chance for the White House until Obama exploded into America’s consciousness with his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

The rest, as they say, is history — history in a very real way. Now that it’s happened, we know it’s possible: for Americans of color, the promise that our children can grow up to be president is no longer a theory, but a fact. We need no longer believe; for now we know.

That’s something of which we can all be proud.

Carlos A. Rodriguez is opinion editor of The Brownsville Herald. Contact him at (956) 982-6681 or by e-mail at crodriguez@brownsvilleherald.com.