Barack Obama (WDCpix)

When Barack Obama took the stage at the We Are One concert at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday, he signaled not only the arrival of a new administration to Washington but the arrival of a patriotism that looks new but isn’t. This patriotism’s founding document is the Declaration of the Independence. Abraham Lincoln, not George Washington, is the father of the nation, and Martin Luther King, not Ronald Reagan, is its greatest recent leader. This patriotism is not red, not white, but blue.

“It is how this nation has overcome the greatest differences and the longest odds,” Obama declared to the huge crowd on the mall, “because there is no obstacle that can stand in the way of millions of voices calling for change.”

The televised spectacle hammered home the message with the constant brooding visage of Lincoln peering down on a multiracial cast of singers dressed in bipartisan red and blue who were clearly having a ball. The penultimate song in which Pete Seeger, the ebullient 89-year-old former communist, joined Bruce Springsteen bawling out “This Land Is Your Land,” a working man’s anthem written by another leftist, Woody Guthrie, showed just how capacious this new patriotism is.

But, of course, this blue patriotism is not new. It is found everywhere in Washington, hidden in plain view, forgotten by those who preferred not to learn its lessons. For example, when Obama begins the parade from the Capitol to the White House on Tuesday, he will pass the unobtrusive but swank Capitol Grille on the northwest corner of 6th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, where a bronze plaque outside its door notes that the Star Spangled Banner was first sung in public on this corner in 1814 and that a free black man named Beverly Snow had once ran a restaurant there in the 1830s.

Obama’s passage through this intersection reveals the country’s racial history anew, its complexities and glories. Beverly Snow, proprietor of the Epicurean Eating House, was a man who wouldn’t have been out of place in Obama’s Washington, a mixed race entrepreneur who had a way with words, friends in high places and a fondness for good food. Back then, he found success but by his very example generated fears. In the city’s first race riot in August 1835 Snow was hounded out of business by a white mob as city authorities, including Francis Scott Key, the author of the national anthem then serving as the city’s District Attorney, stood aside.

Obama’s ascension to the presidency is the culmination of a struggle that began on the streets of Washington 175 years ago. The red-blue dynamics that have dominated American politics for the last 40 years were born here in the first real national debate over slavery. A few months after ‘the Snow-storm” as the 1835 riot was known, a handful of brave congressmen from the Northeast and Midwest, blue states today, for the first time began submitting petitions from their constituents demanding abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. Southern legislators, uniformly from states considered “red,” (at least before 2008) responded by imposing the gag rule forbidding any debate about the issue.

At stake was the very meaning of American patriotism. For the red state representatives, to raise the question of whether the white man had the right to enslave Africans was to insult not only their rights but to subvert the essence of the United States of America. Red patriotism was, in the words of historian Gary Gerstle, a kind of “racial nationalism,” which the country’s glory was tied to white man’s prerogatives. For the blue states, patriotism was “civic nationalism,” based on fidelity to the Declaration of Independence, especially its defining phrase, “All men are created equal.” The two American patriotisms have dueled ever since.

Obama’s victory is a triumph of blue patriotism that has been a long time coming. Red patriotism, while it has long since repudiated overt racial appeals, continues to embody the view that America has achieved its greatness–and must be defended from those who would undermine it. Blue patriotism has all along insisted that America’s greatness depended on living up to its ideals–and has to be defended from those who do not take those ideals seriously.

From the start, red patriotism had the upper hand. Francis Scott Key, whose lyrics defined “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” prosecuted abolitionists who dared advocate their cause in the capital city. Key’s brother-in-law and close friend, Roger Taney, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, would go on to write the 1858 Dred Scott decision which legalized slavery everywhere and hastened the arrival of the war between the states.

Many abolitionists responded by reviling America as a wicked and irredeemable country. But other abolitionists embraced America despite the blot of slavery. The first great blue patriots were former president turned congressman John Quincy Adams, who single-handedly battled the gag rule in the face of insults and threats, and Frederick Douglass, a former slave and orator who denounced America’s hypocritical celebration of the 4th of July but predicted that the Declaration of Independence and “the genius of American institutions” would eventually prevail over the slave masters.

Douglas was proven right by Abraham Lincoln, the greatest blue patriot. Unlike Obama, this Illinois politico did not come to office as a blue patriot. He rejected abolitionism as extremism and espoused white supremacy. But in the crucible of the War Between the States, he understood that America had no choice but destroy the slave system in the name of universal liberty. In the Gettysburg address and the Second Inaugural address Lincoln redefined what America would look like after that was achieved. It would be “a more perfect union,” in which the spirit of the Declaration would be transformed into constitutional protections for the former slaves.

With Lincoln’s assassination and the advent of Jim Crow in the South, red patriotism (and white supremacy) remained the norm for another century. But every popular and politically effective social reform movement of the 19th and 20th century would promote their causes as carrying out the ideals of the Declaration and the preamble to the Constitution. From Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s declaration of women’s rights at Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, to the labor movement of early 20th century to the civil rights movement of the 1950 and 60s all drew on this tradition. At the peak of their influence in the 1930s, even American communists (like Pete Seeger) liked to describe their ideology as “20th century Americanism.”

Amid some stagy theatrics, the We Are One concert showcased this history. The giant TV screen along the Reflecting Pool flashed back to grainy newsreel footage from 1939 when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let Marian Anderson sing at Constitution Hall because she was black. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for her to sing at the Lincoln Memorial where the 16th president’s two greatest speeches are inscribed. Anderson sang, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” not the Star Spangled Banner.)

So, in 1963 it was natural for Martin Luther King to choose to give his “I Have a Dream Speech” on the steps of the Memorial. It was equally natural that a country only just beginning to renounce Jim Crow laws preferred to ignore King’s speech. In its coverage, Life magazine, then one of the country’s most popular magazines, ran exactly one line of text about King’s speech and made no mention of his dream.

Not always noticed, not always successful, this tradition of blue patriotism was nonetheless a source of political strength for liberal causes. “For American leftists, patriotism was indispensable,” historian Michael Kazin has written. “It made their dissent and rebellion intelligible to their fellow citizens and located them with the national narrative, fighting to shape a common future.”

The exceptions were the anti-war and Black Power movements of the 1960s, whose leaders, like the radical abolitionsits before them, rejected the very idea of American patriotism, attacking the country’s leaders, institution and history with insults and guns. Red patriots began to link progressive causes to riots, bombs and burning flags. Ronald Reagan parlayed this theme into the governorship of California in 1966 by depicting liberals as soft on the rioters in Los Angeles. In time, Reagan perfected red patriotism by shearing off its overt racial appeals and his sunny optimism enjoyed a consistent popularity, at least among white Americans.

But the covert racial appeals of red patriotism never went away. Red patriotism, founded in the struggle against the abolitionists, never entirely abandoned the notion that social change was the harbinger of black violence and violation of white women. A common theme in the partisan press of the 1830s, this dire theme recurred a century and a half later in George H.W. Bush’s successful TV ads in 1988 linking his liberal Democrat opponent to a black rapist.

The last gasp of red patriots’ effort to impugn the blue patriotism was attempt to trash Obama’s patriotism by linking him to former Weatherman bomber Bill Ayers. It didn’t work because the country has grown multiracial since 1988. (Salon’s Joan Walsh points out that if the country had the same ethnic makeup in 2008 that it had in 1988 Obama would have lost to McCain.) But it also failed because Obama had made his name by offering a more inclusive and hopeful patriotism.

In his 2004 Democratic convention speech, the young Senator from Illinois declared “Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation — not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy”-an implicit rebuke to the complacency of red patriotism.

“Our pride,” he went on, “is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”

But Obama advanced blue patriotism by imbuing the traditional invocation of the Declaration of Independence with new-found confidence. He noted that the red-blue vocabulary of contemporary politics injected a dualism into American patriotism that is not only unnecessary but also unrealistic. To those who invoked the superiority of red patriotism, he said, “I’ve got news for you.”

“We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States,” he said. “We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States, There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq.”

Blue patriotism is just as good, just as pervasive, as red, Obama said, and the election results last November vindicated his vision.

Obama’s inauguration, of course, does not mean that America has overcome its social and racial divides. But it does mean that the popular definition of American patriotism is undergoing a decisive change The concert on the mall was its first, but not last, display. Even President Bush, in a gracious passage of his farewell address, acknowledged that Obama’s victory shows “the vitality of American democracy.” It was a tacit recognition that the long ascendancy of red patriotism that began on the streets of Washington 175 years ago is over, at least for now. American patriotism is blue.

I told the remarkable story of Beverly Snow and Washington’s first race riot in the Washington Post magazine in February 2004.

A parade of speakers in St. Paul, including Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann, a Hispanic businessman, an Arizona educator, and President Bush (speaking from the White House via video link) hailed the prospective nominee John McCain for his courage as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, his 26 years in Congress, even his decision to adopt a child from Bangladesh.

Partisan rhetoric was, for the most part, muted. “John McCain doesn’t speak the language of service. He has lived a life of service,” said Bachmann, presumably in reference to the too-eloquent Democratic nominee Barack Obama. In a clumsier swipe, President Bush averred that if McCain’s North Vietnamese captors could not break his resolve, the “angry left” could not either.

The crowd of 20,000 people responded with rapt attention and the occasional standing ovation, even as the last two speakers of the evening worked hard–Bush loyalists might say too hard–to distinguish the nominee from the man he hopes to succeed.

Former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson noted with a hint of admiration that the party’s new standard bearer once dated a stripper. (The TV cameras mercifully spared us Cindy McCain’s reaction to her husband’s taste in female company.) Thompson reminded the Republican faithful that young Congressman McCain bucked Ronald Reagan on the wisdom of sending U.S. troops to the Middle East, an observation that seemed to send a ripple of unease through the crowd. And Thompson described the federal government, run for the last eight years by the already-forgotten incumbent, as “wasteful and too often incompetent.” No one was heard to object.

The solution to the “nightmare” of contemporary Washington, said lapsed Democrat Sen. Joe Lieberman, was John McCain. Among the Arizona Senators’ many accomplishments, Lieberman explained, was his hostility to “corrupt Republican lobbyists”–some of whom were no doubt itching to exit the premises in search of strippers unfamiliar with public service. Lieberman added kind words for the various legislative accomplishments of Bill Clinton, the former Democratic president who warmly endorsed Obama just a week ago—and the confused crowd responded with applause.

To be fair, it has not been an easy convention for the GOP rank and file. On Monday, Republicans who pride themselves on traditional family values had to learn to scratch the phrase “illegitimate child” from their vocabularies, lest they be taken as less than loyal to prospective vice president (and grandmother) Gov. Sarah Palin. Last night, they began to learn another lesson: that McCain’s campaign slogan, “Country First,” also means “We got no brand.”

The challenges facing the Palin family are a matter of public record. Bristol Palin has gotten two traffic tickets in the past 15 months, according to Alaska court records. She was stopped for speeding in June 2007 and ticketed for failure to exercise  “due caution” in February 2008. So the girl is careless behind the wheel. She has engaged in premarital sex and gotten pregnant. Those aren’t mortal sins, nor are they necessarily an indictment of Palin’s parenting. They are fairly normal for American families with teenagers and almost any parent of adolescents will sympathize.  One can only hope she outgrows her mistakes. Nonetheless, the facts of Palin’s family life raise questions about two key points of the conservative domestic policy agenda.

Until Thursday night, it had been a crowded week for the Democratic National Convention. There were too many delegates and too many reporters jammed into the too-small Pepsi Center. The conversations of the faithful were crowded with anxieties about slipping poll numbers, soft messaging, elusive unity, and the omnipresent Clintons. Memories of disastrous Augusts (John Kerry in 2004, Al Gore in 2000 and Michael Dukakis in 1988) pinched the party’s imagination.

Tonight those hemmed-in feelings dispersed into the breezes of mammoth Invesco Field, where an adoring throng of 84,000 cheered Barack Obama as he accepted his party nomination with a speech– none too lofty and none too soft–that reinfused his historic campaign with a sense of history and horizon that had seemed lacking in recent weeks.

Early on Obama declared “enough,” and that word resonated throughout his 48-minute speech. So did the phrase “Now is the time.” Those simple sentiments bookended a comprehensive indictment of Republican presumptive nominee as honorable but clueless (“It’s not that John McCain doesn’t care. It’s that he doesn’t get it.”) and challenges to his own party (“Democrats, Democrats, we must also admit that fulfilling America’s promise will require more than just money”).

Tough talk on Afghanistan (“We must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights”) was combined with tender feelings toward his grandmother (“She poured everything she had into me”).

After delivering a laundry list of specific policy proposals, Obama returned to the post-partisan rhetoric that helped him prevail over the more traditional style of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries.

“These — these are the policies I will pursue,” he declared in summation. “And in the weeks ahead, I look forward to debating them with John McCain.”

“But what I will not do,” he went on, “is suggest that the senator takes his positions for political purposes, because one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other’s character and each other’s patriotism.”

“I’ve got news for you, John McCain,” he finished. “We all put our country first.”

Thus did Obama put a partisan edge on his postpartisanship. He sharpened the choice facing voters 68 days from now without closing the door to his appeals to Republicans and independents. He again demonstrated the political agility that brought him to this historic occasion and almost certainly restored his supporters’ confidence that was a little shaky just a few hours earlier.