Anchorage Daily News

American politics today are as dynamic and energizing as at any time since the conservative revolution of 1980, when Ronald Reagan stopped postwar liberalism's political agenda in its tracks. As then, Americans today seem to want policy changes in economic, race and foreign policy. But remarkably, the emergence of a black man and a woman as viable presidential candidates has changed presidential politics in America forever. There are other issues -- transcending partisan politics, and getting beyond corruption. But nothing matches bringing diversity and equality to presidential politics.

Economic issues dominated the presidential campaign of 1980. It was then that anti-tax, supply-side economic policy first achieved its national ascendancy. Race played a role in that election also; the Supreme Court had just struck down racial quotas in college admissions, and Reagan called for a return to states' rights. At the same time, voters repudiated President Jimmy Carter mostly on the basis of the Iranian hostage crisis. In a landslide, Republicans took control of the U.S. Senate for the first time in 25 years.

The political shift this year could be just as dramatic, in the opposite direction. In economic policy, for example, even before the residential mortgage crisis generated the current recession, with a big boost from rising oil prices and the corresponding upsurge of airline and food costs, Americans had grown uneasy with the growing income gap and the large percentage of workers earning less than a living wage. On race, before the emergence of Barack Obama's presidential bid, the Supreme Court's extension of the exclusion of race as a factor in allocating school populations, in the Louisville, Ky., and Seattle school cases in 2007, gave rise to both confusion and hostility. And on the war, recent polls demonstrate that 67 percent of Americans don't think the U.S. presence in Iraq is a good idea.

Nothing in American history, however, parallels either a black man or a woman as viable contenders for a major party presidential nomination. Obama has tried to transcend and defuse the race issue as a candidate, and thus suggest that America has transcended and defused race. He has presented himself as a unifier, calling Americans to a new politics that suppresses entrenched partisanship. His pastor in Chicago, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, this week made that much more difficult with the gauntlet he threw at the candidate. It remains to be seen if Obama's disowning of Wright on Tuesday will be sufficient damage control.

Hillary Clinton has also attempted to escape the typological label. She focuses on her long tenure in Washington, arguing that only she has learned enough about how power works there to translate the mandate for change into effective action.

Neither of the two has been able fully to escape typology, least of all Obama, now that Wright's ego has bested him. Nonetheless, the prospects for one or the other to be elected look very promising, and will look even better once one of them is nominated. Even should John McCain win the presidency, this campaign is already historic.

Perhaps sensing the change, 26 House Republicans have announced their retirements. Hard-core conservatives in the Republican Party do not trust McCain, and have driven the party increasingly right, and thus away from the American mainstream. Whoever is elected is likely to have a strong Democratic Congress.

If Democrats do take control of the American government, will they be able to govern effectively? History suggests that governing is a complicated and delicate business, the realities of which tend to be obscured by the rituals and press coverage of the quadrennial campaign. Governance is impossible without power, and without compromise. Politics, which has as its aim the marshaling of power in order to do good, is what we do instead of war. To the powerless and uninitiated the power appears overbearing and often unresponsive. To literalists and purists, compromise feels like betrayal. Those exercising the power feel embattled and often unappreciated. To effect real change in America will take time and patience, an advisory as important for electors as for the elected, and a reality which will blunt the euphoria of victory, Democrat or Republican, but shouldn't obscure the significance of the history that's already been made.

Steve Haycox is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

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