The Obama Speech

by Brian Leubitz [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]

Here at Calitics, we've been heavily focused on the statehouse, but here at Take Back America there is a buzz about the Obama speech. Take a look at the big corporate papers or the blogs, and you see that something changed in America yesterday. Heck, it even got a self-described "Clintonista" at myDD to praise Obama. And it's at the top of the rec list. Perhaps it won't be something remembered for a generation, but it just might be one of those days where you remember where you were. The big CA papers even saw fit to pause from their pinata fun-time with Jeremiah Wright:

Sen. Barack Obama, another lanky lawyer from Illinois, planted one of those rhetorical markers in the political landscape Tuesday, when he delivered his "More Perfect Union" speech in Philadelphia, near Independence Hall. The address was meant to dampen the firestorm of criticism that has attached itself to the senator's campaign since video clips of race-baiting remarks by his Chicago church's former pastor began circulating last week.

But instead of offering a simple exercise in damage control, Obama chose to place his discussion of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright's incendiary comments in a wider consideration of race in America -- and the results were, like those Kennedy achieved in Houston, historic.(LAT 3/19/08)

I, of course, was here at TBA where I squeezed into the press room to watch it on CNN. There was a rapt silence across the room as the speech floated from discussions of his occasionally thoughtless grandmother to the acknowledgment of the very real divides of race.  Immediately afterwards, the campaign emailed out the text and video of the speech.  

This surely won't be the end of the race issue, but perhaps we can mold the debate to something that's more productive. A chunk of the speech over the flip.

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.

We can do that.

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.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don't have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

The issue is not just race, it's that resources are not shared evenly. It's that people are hurting under this administration. We cannot have a Third Term. So perhaps this speech will redirect our focus on the issues that people care about.