Arts the key to America's human growth

Yay
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From Newsweek writer Jeremy McCarter:

Since election day, pundits have exhausted themselves trying to locate every last reason for Barack Obama's win. But the fine-tooth combing has missed something—or, rather, someone: Walt Whitman. Nobody has pointed out that Obama shares his victory with the generations of writers and musicians and painters in the fervently democratic tradition that descends from our national poet.

To understand how the arts prepared the way for Obama, we first need to clarify what it means when people (including the president-elect) say that "only in America" could his story be possible. That can't be a statement about law or politics, since the election of someone with Obama's unconventional background is technically possible in plenty of democracies. It's really a statement about our national imagination: only in America could a majority of voters see a person who is so unlike them—a black man who has an African father, a mother from Kansas, an international childhood, a name packed with vowels—as a fellow citizen who's capable of leading them. And where did we Americans learn to be so uniquely broad-minded? In large part, from our artists.