“The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep,” he declared. “But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there.”

Personal temperament alone cannot account for Obama’s combination of impatient ambition and imperturbable calm, self-confidence and humility. Rather, these qualities signal an understanding of himself as part of something bigger than the personal. He arrived in this place, he acknowledged in his speech on race, in the river of history, carried by a social movement of “Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part — through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk — to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.”

“Yes we can”: The operative word is we.

This comes as a huge relief after eight years of a regime that refused the lessons of history because it believed itself directed by supernatural forces and transhistorical values — our “good” against their “evil.” This delusion was embodied in the doctrine of the “unitary executive.” It emerged from the president’s mouth in an almost daily utterance: “I am confident.”

The operative word was I.

The Obama election — and, in no small part, the economic crisis — takes a wrecking ball to the Ownership Society, which defined patriotism as personal consumption and citizenship as commitment to one’s own home and family. The fresh air that rushes in now is the conviction that personal responsibility is not antithetical to collective obligation — realized ultimately in government — and that personal reward comes not from getting mine but from creating ours.

The decisive triumph of unity over isolation and bigotry rendered even more dispiriting the passage of anti-gay-marriage propositions in California, Florida and Arizona, along with a measure in Arkansas, clearly aimed at gays and lesbians, prohibiting unmarried couples from adopting children or serving as foster parents.

The victory of these homophobic measures was bad enough, but almost equally dismaying was the reaction from the media and many white same-sex marriage proponents: Blame African Americans. “Proposition 8 Exit Poll: Whites oppose, blacks support, Latinos divided, the Los Angeles Times posted on November 4, before all the data were in. Because African Americans had come out in huge numbers to vote for the Democratic candidate, the press immediately christened it the Obama Effect.

Resentment bloodied the gay blogosphere. “I’m not sure what to do with this,” wrote the sex columnist Dan Savage in a typical post. “I’m thrilled that we’ve just elected our first African-American president. I wept last night. I wept reading the papers this morning. But I can’t help but feeling hurt that the love and support aren’t mutual.

“I do know this, though: I’m done pretending that the handful of racist gay white men out there — and they’re out there, and I think they’re scum — are a bigger problem for African Americans, gay and straight, than the huge numbers of homophobic African Americans are for gay Americans, whatever their color.”

A handful? Huge numbers? As the African-American lesbian blogger Lainad put it, “Oh, please.”

The initial reports turned out to be wrong. In the end, polls showed the only race-sex group that did not support Prop. 8 was white women, who came out against it 53 to 47. Indeed, nearly 70 percent of African-Americans voted yes, across income, education, age and sex. African American churchgoers — who voted, like other regular churchgoers, overwhelmingly in favor — were encouraged by their pastors, who in turn were lobbied by the proposition’s promoters, largely white groups not generally known for their alliances with people of color.

The proponents also lied. A slick flier produced by Yes on 8 and mailed to thousands of African-American households the weekend before election day featured a photograph of Obama, wedding band on prominent display, with Michelle laughing in the background. The large-type quote read: “I’m not in favor of gay marriage.”

In fact, both Obama and Biden oppose gay marriage and have said so plainly. But both have also stated their support for extending civil rights of partnership to all, and both explicitly opposed Prop. 8. They reiterated that opposition after the propaganda went out.

I’m not going to excuse anyone who cast a ballot for homophobia, no matter what the reason. And, while I’m at it, I’m not going to excuse Obama for his socially conservative positions and decisions, including sharing a stage with mega-evangelist Rick Warren, a star on the Christian gay-conversion circuit.

Still, blacks made up just 6 percent of California voters. Even 70 percent of 6 percent is not enough to pass anything. Why is Prop. 8 their fault?

As DailyKos opined, fingerpointing will get us nowhere.

What will?

The answer is not the cloakroom deal making suggested by Dan Savage: I supported “your” guy, so you should get behind “my” issue.

The answer is solidarity.

In his speech on race, Obama asked his black sisters and brothers to “[bind] our particular grievances . . . to the larger aspirations of all Americans: the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who’s been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family.” On election night, the president-elect broadened that circle of solidarity, calling in “young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled.” It may be the first time a president has pronounced the word gay, with respect and fellowship, in public.

If it was rare to hear such a rainbow-coalition recitation from Obama — whose own story belies the simplicity of any one of those labels — it is not because he is the first “post-identity-politics” candidate or “post-racial” black politician, as many pundits have dubbed him. (Apparently only politicians of color have to be either “racial” or not.) Read his books and you will discover a man struggling to embrace the African-American heritage that was, until his adulthood, mainly a matter of genes.

Rather, as Beck Young, a Barnard women’s studies professor, pointed out, Obama simply does not see race or racism primarily as a personal matter — and that is the only way the pundits, especially the white Republican ones, can see it. Obama is interested in institutionalized inequality. And, though he constantly talked about the middle class, the poor recognized in his rhetoric something no one dared name, except as a smear: class struggle. This does not make Obama pre-, post- or extra-identity politics. It makes his campaign, like Martin Luther King’s, a movement for more than civil rights: a movement for justice.

Ironically, the campaign that ran away from race and only surreptitiously allied itself with the left has moved the left’s antiracist politics from the margins to the mainstream. I suspect President Obama will have more trouble dealing with the left part than the antiracist part.

But the mainstream was already moving. Young and first-time voters cast their ballots for Obama two to one. In California, they opposed Proposition 8 by the same margin. Minorities who had voted Republican voted Democratic in significant numbers, and minorities will soon constitute a majority of the electorate. As the main protagonist of American politics, Joe the Plumber, RIP.

If some racial minorities do not yet recognize sexual minorities as legitimate members of the polity, then there is much work to be done. “This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change,” declared the president-elect. He exhorted Americans to “summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to . . . look after not only ourselves but each other.”

Call it patriotism. Call it solidarity. It is discombobulating to contemplate the two entwined. Still, like Michelle Obama, this is the first time in my adult life I have felt proud of my country. And when I look at the beautiful face of the first Kansan-Kenyan president, that pride moves me to relinquish blame and resolve anew to look after my fellow Americans — even those who are not yet ready to look after me and mine.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

Two kids, about 13 years old, stepped in behind me. One barred the door. The other covered the intercom with his back. He poked a penknife into my side. “Gimme your money.”

“I don’t have any money,” I replied, trembling. It was true. I pulled my jeans pockets out and offered him a subway token, the only tender I was carrying.

He sneered at it. The boys exchanged glances. A few endless seconds elapsed. The spokesman addressed me: “OK.” Then he slid along the wall to the opened door. Stepping outside, he muttered in my direction, “Sorry.”

Sorry for yourself, motherfucker, I thought. Now you’ll just have to go out and pull another crime.

This memory came back to me when Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid demanded that Bush and Cheney apologize for the CIA leak and “come clean with the American public.”

Come clean? No way. Before the 2006 elections, I’m hoping for mountains more dirt — and the docket lengthening beyond Libby, DeLay, Abramoff, Franklin, Tobin and Safavian, to Frist, Rove, Norton and (I can dream) Cheney and Bush. Apologize? My first reaction: Who’s sorry now, motherfuckers?

Still, as it happens, I have been reflecting recently on apology and its complement, forgiveness. October was the Jewish High Holy Days, culminating in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Fittingly, the first sins named in the Viddui, or confessional prayer, are slander and gossip.

No surprise, the Republicans are claiming innocence. But in the spirit of the season, let’s imagine the words “I’m sorry” emerging from Dick Cheney’s smirking lips. What might such an apology accomplish?

To get your name into the Book of Life for the coming year, a Jew has to atone genuinely. God knows when you’re bluffing. To keep your office in government, the apology can sometimes be scripted and unfelt. Early speculation had Scooter Libby pleading guilty, taking the fall in order to forestall a trial more damaging to his bosses. That he didn’t do so might signal realism in the White House. Polls show a majority of Americans believe Libby’s case indicates wider problems of “ethical wrongdoing” within the Administration; a plea probably wouldn’t exonerate them. Then again, Reagan apologized for Iran-Contra and rose again. When Rove thinks a mea culpa will work, we’ll hear one.

Apologies are useful for less cynical purposes, though, in politics as in personal life. Before bowing at God’s feet, Jews spend the month humbling themselves to other people — resolving quarrels, asking forgiveness even for wrongs perpetrated in ignorance. For believer or atheist, it’s an interesting exercise. No matter how lightly delivered, the words change the speaker. An apology is an implicit admission of fallibility. It is also a promise to do better. That moves the recipient toward forgiveness.

Apologies are necessary to get from conflict to peace, argues psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin. Benjamin, whose work concerns recognition — the ways we know ourselves and others, and ourselves through others — is collaborating with a Palestinian therapist in a project to enable Jews and Palestinians to acknowledge the suffering they have caused each other. In the process, they recognize each other’s humanity.

To be meaningful, Benjamin says, this recognition must be public; the more powerful player must “go first.” An example: South Africa’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission, along with the amnesty granted the criminals of apartheid. Was justice done? Punishment, the Mandela government must have reasoned, temporarily settles scores, but in the long run it may escalate the cycle of vengeance. Was every white cop or bureaucrat named in the witness box truly sorry? It almost doesn’t matter. The public acknowledgment of wrong prevented South Africa from drowning in the blood of its past. That gave justice a chance.

The GOP isn’t apologizing for the pain it has caused Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, the Iraqis, U.S. soldiers or American democracy. No, they are acting like my muggers: feeling sorry for themselves, and more chutzpahdic, vying for sympathy. From the National Review to Fox News, conservative journalists are blabbing about “the criminalization of politics” — that’s the Democrats’ tactic, in case you’re confused. “It’s a reasonable bet that the fall of 2005 will be remembered as a time when it became clear that a comprehensive strategy of criminalization had been implemented to inflict defeat on conservatives who seek to govern as conservatives,” wrote Bill Novak, the Time columnist who outed Plame.

Money-laundering, perjury, illegal war, torture — yeah, I’d call that governing as conservatives. As for Novak’s poor-us pose, the blogger Hunter expressed my sympathies best: “Oh, boo-goddamn-dumbfucking-hoo.”

All right, so I’m not ready to reconcile with the Bush administration. But its irreconcilable differences with the Iraqis make me and all Americans the Iraqis’ enemies, like it or not. The Viddui is spoken in the first person plural: Each person’s sin is the whole community’s sin. I am responsible, if not to atone for my government’s wrongdoing, then to acknowledge publicly the suffering it causes and act against it, for peace.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.