Bring it on!

Sometime during the snows of Iowa, the Clintons realized that the upstart fellow who was challenging Hillary’s entitlement to the presidency was making great gains and might actually win the nomination.

While Barack Obama was drawing larger and more dynamic crowds, electrifying them with his optimism and his conviction that America can actually find a different and better way in the world, the Clintons were drawing large crowds too, but there was something missing.

It would be cheap to simply call it hope.

Never daunted by the worst of times, the Clintons set about to improve Hillary’s chances, taking on the very delicate task of making sure the contest became about race.

Bill Clinton charged into the spotlight to characterize Obama’s record of opposition to our invasion of Iraq as “a fairy tale.”

He insisted that a vote for this graduate of Harvard Law School and constitutional law professor, veteran of effective community organizing on the mean streets of Chicago, eight years in the Illinois state senate and now two in the US Senate, would just be “rolling the dice.”

The way voting for Abraham Lincoln was, I guess.

Clinton surrogates spread out to remind us that their opponent, as a teenager, had experimented with drugs. Not only that, he has a middle name that is very popular within the Muslim communities around the world and identifies the ruling family of the Kingdom of Jordan!

Truth became innuendo: according to Robert Johnson (known for heading up BET, a purveyor of “gangsta rap”), Obama was “doing something – I won’t say what, but he wrote about it in his book” back in the neighborhoods of Chicago. He went on to liken Obama to Sidney Poitier playing the movie role of a very educated and “mannered” black man who was finally found acceptable by his white in-laws to be, in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”

Andrew Young, veteran of the 1960s civil rights movement, declared that Obama is “too young” -- notwithstanding that he is 11 years older than the age of qualification set forth in the Constitution, three years older than JFK was when he became president, and a whole year older than Bill Clinton was at the time of his inauguration!

Young said Obama should “wait,” that “his time will come and the world will be ready for visionary leadership.”

Isn’t the world ready now?

All the while this was going on, the Clintons chided and tsk-tsked; this remark or that email may have been regrettable, or even “out of bounds,” but they would NEVER, EVER engage in race-baiting, and if there had been any injection of race into the campaign, well, then, “He started it!

True, the Clintons were not technically race-baiting; they were merely making sure that every single voter in South Carolina (a) remembered that Barack Obama is African-American and (b) had a chance to wonder whether he can win. Their intention is to do the one thing that Barack Obama had just about overcome: They want voters to see him as “the black candidate,” with the almost inescapable corollary that he would concern himself most with “black” issues.

I heard a commentator remark that the Clintons have a history of leaving a trail of damage believing they can always fix it later. Will it work this time? And is the country really not ready?

Maybe elders in the black leadership like John Lewis, Andrew Young and Charlie Rangel, bearing the scars of literal and figurative batons and dogs in the long and dreadful struggle for equality, are accustomed to think like this; they believe that a Democratic victory will almost certainly move the country forward again, yet are still, 50 years on, afraid to believe in their own successes.

But all around America, the younger generation, black and white, north and south, are turning out in droves to hear and see Obama, to register to vote, and to participate – many for the first time -- in the greatest democracy in the world.

The topic of race in America has become an undercurrent of the campaign, to the apparent satisfaction of some Clinton supporters and to the dismay of others. The former believe that it will drive not only more white voters to Clinton but also blacks who are fearful that Obama must lose because they dare not believe anything has changed in all these years.

Some of those whose reaction is dismay are tempted to want to make it go away by not discussing it at all: “Let’s get back to the issues, to the candidates’ differences, their likely style of governing; we don’t want this to be about race!”

There are pundits and politicians who like to describe what’s going on as “bickering” between the candidates.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you a truth: It’s not bickering, it’s deadly serious, and it’s not going to go away. Unless we haul it out into the sunlight and challenge it, we will be gone another generation before anyone tries again.

To those who say “Americans will not elect a black man, so there’s no point in trying, it isn’t time yet,” I say: How do you know that? Just when will the right time be? Why can’t we find out?

I’m not sure we’ll ever have this opportunity again.

I challenge the black and white and brown Americans who want to make the leap into a new place, to once again pass the torch to a new generation, to tell the doubters and the timid and the cynics:

“Bring it on!” Let’s get this over with and go forward.

I believe that this movement of hope has caught hold, that hundreds of thousands will emulate the past by marching, this time to the polls.

Now that Barack Obama has won the South Carolina primary by two to one over Clinton, agreed by all pundits to far exceed even the most generous predictions, I dare to believe that, just maybe, America has overcome, after all.

All over America voters have come to believe, because of the Obama campaign, that we may finally realize the American dream together.

For if not now, when?