Obama's speech just now was magnificent not because he relied on soaring rhetoric but because he eschewed it. He spoke simply and directly about one of the third rails of American politics from his unique vantage point as a black man with white ancestors and the child of an immigrant. His analysis was measured and brilliant in how he empathized with disgruntled and cynical black youths defeated by racism, but urged them to transcend; how he also empathized with struggling white workers unsympathetic to America's history of discrimination and yet urged them, too, to join in the fight to better this nation.
What he did this morning in Philadelphia was put his theory of change into practice.
I have to tell you I was worried. When he was the color-blind candidate, he was Teflon. None of the Republican strategists knew how to run against him. Then the Ferraro flap followed so closely by Rev. Wright's words whipped up again by first Fox and then the real news outlets (plus the losses in Texas and Ohio and the Rezko scandal) threatened to stop this historic campaign in its tracks.
Instead, Obama's willingness to cowboy up and face all the accusations at the same time has been breathtaking in its transparency. After he sat down with the Chicago Tribune to explain in detail his dealings with Rezko the once critical paper gushed, "Barack Obama now has spoken about his ties to Tony Rezko in uncommon detail. That's a standard for candor by which other presidential candidates facing serious inquiries now can be judged."
He did the same thing today in Philadelphia. Instead of running and hiding, slipping and sliding he not only confronted the problem head on but used it as a springboard to talk about his solutions for the real issues that devil this nation.
Trey Ellis is the author of Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single-Fatherhood.
Get ready folks for a landslide. DNC supers have had it, and realize that the conservative slur machine is weakened when unity within the dem party has their say.... McCain has been strengthened by this quarreling, and a big move to stop what is essentially "conservative momentum" within the dem party.
Is this your latest Bedtime Story? Just thinking.
COGITO, ERGO SUM.
Again, many good themes in his message, but to applaud Obama for candor and transparency in his speech, when it became necessary in party because of his own misleadng statements, is, to me, a stretch.
They don't care that Elton John recently said "I would ban religion completely", saying that it turns people into "hateful lemmings".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VftyZkOUxno
How can you be a Christian and still vote for Hillary Clinton? Will she denounce and reject Elton John's Stalinist statements and his support, or is hate speech against those with religious beliefs somehow okay?
He can not separate himself from the comments made by Rev Wright by denying that he was unaware of the philosophy of accusation and attack.
Better to have admitted he was fully aware as most people with a functioning brain will believe.
He then could say that he was going to bring change and healing by uniting in a common cause for the betterment of all.
The Rev was preaching to the choir and he was in the business of pleasing and maintaining his congregation who support him financially not in finding real solutions
Obama can not separate by claiming lack of knowledge and risk being thought an uninformed fool who no one would trust with his finger on the Red Button or anything else of value.
It will not be easy to avoid being labelled a liar which most think he is and has trapped himself between a Rock and a hard place, it will be no easy task to divert his deception without admitting he lied or convincing us he did not lie.
We in our need for hope were hypnotised by rhetoric so ably used by it seems preachers and maybe especially black preachers that in my opinion divides rather than unites
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/149/149syllabus5jeremiad.html
It is called The American Jeremiad and some really interesting information is on that page about the tradition Rev. Wright is a part of. I found it enlightening and perhaps people will better understand that tradition and better understand where Dr. Wright is coming from. Here's a quote:
Sacvan Bercovitch (1978) uses John Winthrop's Model of Christian Charity to describe the American Jeremiad - a sermon that seeks to unify a people by creating tension between ideal social life and its real manifestation. The "jeremiad" is named after the biblical lamentations of Jeremiah ("I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed: how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me?" (chapter 2, verse 21). Of course, we don't seek to understand the jeremiad strictly for its religious significance. We seek to understand the jeremiad because of its role in the construction and critique of public life.
Bercovitch contrasts the American jeremiad with its European predecessor. The European jeremiad depicted a static society condemned to fall perpetually from its mythic roots; it wailed from the pulpit and unleashed a torrent of guilt upon its audience. In contrast, the American jeremiad added the dimension of progress - the hope that public life can improve. The invocation of the American jeremiad involves three steps:
(1) provide a biblical or spiritual standard for individual activity and public life
(2) outline the manners in which a people has fallen from that standard,
(3) envision an ideal public life - with its concurrent individual benefits - that follows a return to the religious standard.
With this ideal, the American jeremiad sustains a paradoxical rhetoric of hope and fear - a tension between the ideal and the real. This tension is designed to generate the requisite energy to improve public life: "It posits a movement from promise to experience - from the ideal of community to the shortcomings of community life - and thence forward, with prophetic assurance, toward the resolution that incorporates (as it transforms) both the promise and the condemnation" (Bercovitch, p. 16). The key to the American jeremiad is its blurring of individual and communal pursuits.
There's a lot more, of course, but I found it really interesting and perhaps will increase understanding among all of us.
Jeremiah is a Biblical name. No idea why you have to twist yourself into knots trying to figure out why his mama named him Jeremiah.
"Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias. "
Sounds like he is trying to equate Reverend Wright w Geraldine Ferraro. Seems like Obama never misses a chance to stick it to people.
Then later this:
"In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time. "
Exactly what "white Americans" is he talking about here? This may be the so-called "Reagan Republicans" but it is not, in general, your average working class Democrat in the big blue states. One of the main things about Clinton Democrats is we don't look for scapegoats as Obama intimates, instead we look to find candidates like the Clintons who can build the economy to address these problems. I know he's looking to the general election, but these aren't the people in the Democratic Party who are opposed to his candidacy, much as he wishes we were.
And finally, this one:
"For 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."
Here again he is acting as if Hillary had something to do w Rev Wright. As far as I know, it was Fox news and the MSM playing this stuff, not Hillary's campaign. Hillary supporters actually did hear this stuff for the first time in the last few days. We were kind of surprised that Obama never heard it before as he suggested in earlier statements, and I think the Hillary people reaction was kind of you've got to be kidding that anyone is going to believe Obama never heard this stuff before. But I don't care very much about this stuff except that it doesn't really add anything positive to Obama's already slim list of achievements.
But the thing that really troubled me about the last quote was
"We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card"
Well, yeah, that's what Obama's been doing all along. Long before anyone heard of Rev Wright his people were "pouncing" on Hillary for her accurate LBJ/MLK statements and trying to twist them into some kind of racial attack. Followed on quickly by the audacity of Bill Clinton's mentioning that Jesse Jackson also won SC as some kind of racial attack instead of a simple observation that Obama had not done anything that hadn't been done before and trying to diminish his victory, which seems like a pretty run of the mill political tactic having nothing to do with race. But Obama's people spun it that way and helped stoke this big "racial divide" that is suddenly on top of Obama's list now that his "strategy" has blown up in his face.
Oh, yeah, other "gaffes" as Obama tries to characterize were Hillary's inocuous "as far as I know" statement. To me it was like "What the hell are you asking me (Hillary) such a stupid question for? How the hell should I (Hillary) know what his religion is? Like I (Hillary) really could care less what it is. Like after 8 years in the White House I (Hillary) sit around thinking or want to know what religion some politician has".
The point is that this is another Obama self-serving speech that I am sure we will hear about forever. Compare what you get out of one of his speeches with what you get out of the 22.7 millions jobs the Clintons added to the economy in 1992-2000.
I am very sorry to say but you are such a liar! It is is your unwillingness to tell truth about race issues in America that continues to divide us. Surely, Obama was right that many whites shared Ms Ferraro view of Black Obama being privileged because he is black. This basically a take on the critique of Affirmative Action, what people call "reverse racism." You can advocate for Clinton all you want, but, I am sorry, your spin can not diminish the honest, and profound way, Obama spoke about the issue of race in American culture, both historically and currently. Your comment is all about pettiness and political spin. I for one do not care if America decides to reject Sen. Obama. All I know is that, in my 42 years of following presidential candidates, no one has even come close, except for Bobby Kennedy after the assassination of Dr. King, in exploring the issue of race with such intelligence, wisdom, courage, and humility. But hey, white americans do have a choice: they can continue with the status quo, or they can chose a leader with a vision dedicated to a proposition that Americans have the capacity to transcend racial and ethnic divisions. By the way, are you suggesting that we should vote for Hillary Clinton because of the economic accomplishments of Bill Clinton? I voted for Bill Clinton twice, but that does not mean that I was also voting for Hillary Clinton. Therefore, Bill Clinton's accomplishments do not necessarily tell me much about what Hillary Clinton would do as President. Unless, of course, you are suggesting that they are co-presidents. If that is the case, then she has to be answerable both for the success and failures of Bill Clinton. If you want to go that route, there are some of us who are ready to highlight those failures. The most glaring one: The loss of the Democratic Congress!
It goes without saying that John McCain and just about the whole Republican Party make me shudder. However, I have been disappointed by both Senators Obama and Clinton. I have not been able to support either one of them for President, because of their refusal to take the lead in ending the Iraq War. It's more important than anything else. This is the first year in history that I may cast no vote for President.
Having said that, this was one amazing speech. I am one half of a mixed-race marriage, and I understand completely. Practically everything Senator Obama had to say about racial issues could have been lifted from conversations between me and my wife. We're also progressives (see above remarks re: Iraq), and so Reverend Wright's comments do not elicit a knee-jerk jingoistic response from us. It may be hard for the general public to accept, but Obama's attempt to place Wright's remarks in the broader context are spot-on.
In the end, however, there is one place where the speech disappoints me utterly. And, wouldn't you know it, it pertains to the issue of war in the Middle East! After bending over backwards to explain that blacks and whites both bear responsibility for improving race relations in America, Obama decries:
"...a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam."
Why isn't it possible for the actions of BOTH the Israelis AND Islamic radicals to be unacceptably provocative? That's how I have always seen it. It's bewildering for Obama to be able to explain the American racial issue so clearly, and yet fail to see the SAME dynamics at work somewhere else.
Why can't he see the Mideast for what it is? Is he wearing the Petroleum Mafia blinders? Or the Christian ones? Or the AIPAC ones? Or is it something else? I would sure like to know.
But he pleaded with America that they should try to understand the plight and pain of Wright, as well as the white and black societies as a whole that have been polarized against each other, and asked us to move past them.
Some people are not ready. Those asking for heads to fall are not ready to negociate or compromise.
Americans have always been horrible at conflict resolution because we all try as hard as we can to hide from anything that makes us uncomfortable. Barack asked us to step out of the comfort zone and try to work this out, for everybody's sake.
I'm sorry if his call was lost on you.
Doesn't that make any sense to do, if he is to be president?
But to late, he never did that with Rev Wrightt!!!
I did hear him throw his own grandmother under the bus. At least I know now why Ferarro isn't anyone special to him. Heck, neither is his white grandmother.
I didn't get the point of the speech other than to apologize for extremism and to take the media to task, again.
There's an old usenet word for you. It's called "troll." Your post isn't a match for what I heard today from Philadelphia.
I don't want to be negative here but American's do not have much of an attention span and this was a LONG speech. Many people probably made up their mind what the speech was about in the first 5 minutes and then tuned out. That is how the mind works and that is why we are seeing so many comments here that seem like they are coming from people who did not listen to the whole 30+ minutes. Even if they did, they really didn't.