OVERBREADTH

Today’s speech by Barack Obama was truly one for the books. It was inspired. It was honest. Wow. You should read the text (annotated version) or watch the youtube video.

I’ve read some of the critiques, and it’s interesting to me how even those who vehemently disapprove of Obama’s politics have a tough time dismissing his brilliance. Some of the attacks are of the form, “well he’s obviously very good with words. This is just him casting the magic word spell again.” I always want to ask these commentators, what they think his trick is. Something to do with rhythmic variation? Some interesting pentameter? Or could it be that it’s the ideas that underly his words?

I was going to excerpt highlights of the speech and include them here. I started to copy quotations that I liked, started to make a list, but it did the speech an injustice. Any clip I chose seemed to give a false impression of the overall tone. How can you include his defense of black anger without including his attack on it? The same goes for the parallel he drew with white anger, the fears of a welfare state and of reverse discrimination that fueled the Reagan coalition.

In short, Obama’s speech recognized the complexity of the issues. With regard to Reverend Wright, he didn’t outright condemn the man, he didn’t outright defend him, and most impressively, he didn’t waffle. He discussed the experiences of a generation of older African Americans, of lingering resentments from social inequality, but also how their views can oversimplify the dialog.

I’ve noticed, the news media hasn’t agreed on which soundbite is the key to the speech. I suspect it’s for the same reason Noam Chomsky, the eighth-most cited scholar in history, is so rarely invited for interviews on television: you can’t cabin his ideas to thirty-seconds. There were no zingers. No read my lips. No change you can xerox. No it’s the economy, stupid. It’s a problem that comes when someone is communicating real world issues in an honest manner. It’s a sign of wisdom.

Having said I shouldn’t excerpt, I’ll break my own rule and part with one.

We have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. 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 we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that. [To which the cable news chants, “Yes we can!”]

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

Today was a real reminder of why I’m supporting Barack Obama.

Update I:

Gawker did a nice roundup of the first wave of media reaction to the story, and concluded with this:

No one who doesn’t read the damn speech for themselves will have any idea of what he was actually saying.

Jon Stewart ended a Daily Show segment with a good line:

And so, at 11 o’clock am on a Tuesday, a prominent politician spoke to Americans about race as though they were adults.

Robert Creamer wrote an excellent post at HuffingtonPost:

Obama talked to Americans as adults. He presented a serious, no-holds-barred discussion of race in America. He showed he trusted the voters. Voters don’t want leaders who patronize them like children — who pander or sloganeer. They want leaders who treat them with respect.

Tags: Seriously //