Barack gave an excellent speech today in Philedelphia. With eloquence and honesty, he addressed the entire issue of race. Peter Canellos, a staff writer for the Boston Globe, made an interesting blog post about the speech:
Analysis: Obama goes beyond generalities on raceEmailLinkComments (0) Posted by James F. Smith March 18, 2008 03:08 PM
By Peter S. Canellos, Globe Staff
PHILADELPHIA -- After a year of speaking of racial reconciliation in mostly hopeful, uplifting terms, Barack Obama today offered a fuller, deeper, and more personal testament to the nation's tormented racial history and how to begin to overcome it.
The
speech had greater weight and specificity than his usual stump speech, and made fewer promises as it wrestled with the legacy of his former pastor and his inflammatory rhetoric. It suggested that an Obama administration would be a time of grappling with difficult and sometimes unpleasant issues rather than conjuring great visions.
For some voters, the speech might serve to remove the glow of optimism surrounding Obama's candidacy; but for many others, it could make him a more realistic president.
Like Mitt Romney's address on his Mormon faith last year, Obama's speech was delivered in a presidential setting -- in the very shadow of Independence Hall -- and invoked common values and historic truths; it showcased Obama more as a national teacher, a role that particularly flatters him, rather than simply an eloquent speaker.
As such, it added gravitas to a candidacy that some have found superficial; and it also served to quell the controversy-of-the-moment over Obama's long association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the pastor whose statements Obama condemned in no uncertain terms while offering a reasonable explanation for why he's sticking by his church and its former minister.
"I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community," said Obama. "I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother."
Starting with a reference to slavery as the country's original sin, Obama aimed for a Lincolnesque tone. Lincoln is frequently cited as a model of presidential leadership and invoked as a figure of reconciliation. But few have tried to capture Lincoln's almost mournful tone of parsing painful issues, piece by piece, in reference to timeless principles -- speeches that were meant to be printed and passed around rather than delivered on the stump and posted on YouTube.
"For the African-American community, that path [to a more perfect union] means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past," Obama said. "It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans. . .
``In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed.''
Obama provided a coda that tied this ongoing struggle to his politics of hope -- suggesting that the benefit of all this hard work will take the form of unified action on priorities such as health care and housing that challenge all Americans.
But this speech will be remembered as the moment that Obama got a little more down and dirty, and grounded his candidacy in serious mechanics of governance. He tried to take apart the engine and get some grease on his hands rather than just pat the hood.
This wasn't the gauzy vision of diversity draped in tapestry metaphors and colored in rainbow hues: It was a nation confronting its sins and overcoming its deeply held fears and prejudices.
"We have a choice in this country . . .," Obama said. "We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy . . . We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card . . .Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time."
For perhaps the first time in the 2008 campaign, Obama presented a big problem as something to be confronted by average people -- the aggrieved white worker, the black person fuming about injustice -- who are part of his own political constituency. There was no corporation or lobbyist or rival politician in the picture.
The question -- for Obama, as well as his legions of hopeful supporters -- is whether those average Americans will give him the answer he wants.
