David: Two years ago, when you started to plan the Obama campaign, did the people in charge of controlling the visual dialogue of the whole endeavor “see” everything from start to finish? Or did they make a series of serendipitous decisions at key points? To wit: who on the campaign had such a grasp of the arc of 20th century history that they could come up with a more perfect exclamation point to such a well run campaign as last night’s Grant Park Rally?

As I was watching the speech, I couldn’t help but marvel at the incredible symbolism: The first black President-Elect, supported by millions of loyal volunteers and backers and funded largely from grass-roots donations, a man perceived to be uniquely capable of reuniting a fractured Democratic base returns to his home city to deliver a speech to 100,000+ wildly cheering supporters from all walks of life and socio-economic backgrounds in Grant Park, the location where (if it’s possible to pinpoint an exact location), the Democratic Party fractured into a thousand ugly pieces 40 years ago.

The sense of symbolism and the knowledge of history is just awe-inspiring.

Addition

This is from an editorial in Salon:

It was ironic that the Democratic Party’s rebirth was happening on a stage in Chicago, the city where it died — or was badly injured anyway — 40 years ago. And on the day after the passing of a grandmother who raised a boy who had no historical reason to believe he could win the presidency of the United States.

I disagree. Holding the speech there, in Grant Park was not ironic in the least. To be honest, I can’t think of a more appropriate location anywhere in America. Selma, Alabama? That would made the campaign specifically about race, scared the right, and at the moment of greatest potential for unification say to the whole world “we’re still not done fighting over this.” There would have been an overtone of triumphalism about such a location, and I would argue that Obama’s campaign was always about healing the divisions in the democratic party, and only tangentially about race.

Maybe the Lincoln Memorial where Obama could have metaphorically stood in the place of Martin Luther King, but that would’ve smacked of arrogance so soon after the election, and humility in the face of such a potentially intimidating accomplishment was essential Tuesday night. We needed to see Barack Obama clearly triumphant, but aware of the gravity of the task ahead. Metaphorically standing in the position of MLK would’ve made this difficult, i think. It is for others (the political cartoonists, the editorial boards, the opinion makers) to put Obama in his proper historical context and to draw the comparisons to the great leaders of the past, should he prove himself worthy.

Grant Park was the only place worthy of the historical gravity of the moment that that speech could have been delivered.