The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg on Obama's speech:
newyorker.com
March 19, 2008
Obama Speaks
This speech should provide skeptics with a clue or two about why many of us are grateful for the opportunity—an opportunity that I, for one, never imagined might come along in what’s left of my lifetime—to support a Presidential candidate like Barack Obama. The speech has the intellectual and emotional acuity which readers of “Dreams from My Father” are already familiar. Ditto the honesty, straightforwardness, and empathy.
Obama has a feel for the texture of American life, both in its complexity and in its grand themes. He has a sure command of the terms of the American civic religion. And he has an understanding of the American past that does justice to many kinds of historical experience. Especially impressive here is his treatment of two kinds of volatile parochialism, black anger and white-working-class resentment: he explains their origins without making excuses for their destructive forms, and he hints at the positive potential of their commonalities.
The speech will not prevent some of those bent on Obama’s political destruction—I’m thinking especially of talk-radio thugs like Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin, and Savage—from portraying him as an exponent of America-hating, whitey-baiting militancy, or at least as a wimpy tool thereof. People who actually read or listen to it will be reassured (if they already support him) or given pause (if they don’t). Its effect on people who don’t experience it directly—the vast majority, presumably—will depend on how it is getting filtered through the media. (Since I’m temporarily ensconced in a cottage in England, amid the hedgerows and sheep fields of Thomas Hardy country, with only spotty Internet access and without cable TV, I’m not in much of a position to have an opinion on that.) |
