According to this story, yes we've come a long way, but we have to recognize we may still have a way to go.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/01/19/king.poll/index.html
More than two-thirds of African-Americans believe Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision for race relations has been fulfilled, a CNN poll found -- a figure up sharply from a survey in early 2008.
The poll found 69 percent of blacks said King's vision has been fulfilled in the more than 45 years since his 1963 "I have a dream" speech -- roughly double the 34 percent who agreed with that assessment in a similar poll taken last March.
But whites remain less optimistic, the survey found.
"Whites don't feel the same way -- a majority of them say that the country has not yet fulfilled King's vision," CNN polling director Keating Holland said. However, the number of whites saying the dream has been fulfilled has also gone up since March, from 35 percent to 46 percent.
In the 1963 speech, delivered to a civil rights rally on the Mall in Washington, King said: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
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Part of the problem going forward is going to come from the heightened expectations that an Obama administration will bring. We keep hearing that we are entering the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression, when the reality appears to be that in many objective measures, we are not even as bad off as we were in 1980. Those of us who grew up in that era can speak to the level of hopelessness and despair that was prominent in that era.
There is no need to exaggerate the significance of the event or the nature of the problems we face. All that does is make peoples expectations as unrealistic as some of the statements we keep hearing from those in the media and government. Many of whom should know better. And it heightens peoples fear and lowers their confidence that we can dig ourselves out of the economic hole we've dug.
That is not to say that we couldn't get to Great Depression II, but please people get a grip. Unemployment was at or above 25% in the 30's. We're not there yet.
What we need is for our leaders to show the qualities that they have been severely deficient in lately. Leadership, foresight and common sense.
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Unfortunately, according to these numbers from PolitiFact, many people are going to be disappointed down the road. We just don't know yet who they are.
http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2009/jan/14/editors-note-introducing-obameter/
PolitiFact is launching an unprecedented journalistic effort to track Obama’s campaign promises and measure the progress of his presidency. Using our new Obameter, we will track each promise — we’ve identified 510 of them — and rate whether it was kept, broken or compromised. Those ratings will be tallied on our Web site, creating an up-to-the-minute report card on the Obama White House.
For the Obameter, our ambitious new campaign promise initiative, PolitiFact writers Angie Drobnic Holan and Robert Farley have spent the last six weeks digging through Obama’s campaign Web site, position papers, speeches, interviews and debate transcripts. The 510 promises they unearthed is a stunning number, more than Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush combined. (I recognize there are limitations to such comparisons because of differences between our methodology and what other news organizations used in 1992 and 2000. But we believe it’s still accurate to say that Obama has promised considerably more.)
Without question, tomorrow's inauguration is a historic date. After that, it's time to roll up our sleeves and get to work, because there is some serious work yet to be done in this country in a lot of areas.
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