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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (14591)	3/20/2008 11:26:04 AM
From: nigel bates	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 149317

Danny Finkelstein of the (UK) Times has a pretty good essay on the speech: timesonline.co.uk It's 2am. You need some sleep because tomorrow is a big day. But you can't go to bed because the speech you have to deliver in the morning is a mess. The pages are all over the floor, the text is too long and you've lost the thread. There are too many people in the room and the suggestions they are pitching are stupid. You need to cut, but you don't know what to cut. What's gone wrong? I'll tell you, because that's a room I've been in as a speechwriter. What's gone wrong is that somewhere in the dim, now forgotten, past (about 36 hours ago in a fast-moving campaign) you failed to ask the key questions - What is this speech really about? Why am I making it? On Monday night, the night before he delivered one of the biggest speeches of his career, Barack Obama was also up until 2am. But the phrase his staff used to describe the work he was doing in the wee hours is revealing. He was, as they describe it, “tweaking away”. That's all the speech needed by that point. Because Obama knew exactly what he wanted to say. He knew precisely why he was delivering this speech. He needed to address the remarks of the Rev Jeremiah Wright, and he needed to do it soon, before his campaign took on any more water. Obama's strategy for dealing with his race identity is the most important pillar of his entire campaign. And Wright was threatening it. Shelby Steele, the African-American author, describes blacks in the US as employing two different strategies. The first is bargaining - accepting white innocence as a given and receiving in return both an earnest effort to prove that acceptance right, and gratitude for the stance. The second is challenging - treating white attitudes with suspicion and directing righteous anger at them for the many horrible transgressions of America's recent past. Challengers get acquiesence, but are feared, not loved. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are challengers. Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Colin Powell, these are bargainers. And Obama too, of course. He's a classic bargainer. (Not in my opinion, he's not. Personally I think the Shelby Steele analysis is as outdated as some of the Rev. Wright's beliefs. "Challenger" and "bargainer" seem to me like academically prettified versions of "uppity n****r" and "Uncle Tom". Neither category describes Obama, and both belong to the past.) Then scandal arrived. The incendiary words of Obama's own pastor, the leader of the church community he had attended for 20-odd years, became public. “God Damn America,” YouTube audiences saw Wright declaim. “God Damn America” on constant loop on the TV news. Had the candidate worshipped with this man for years? Obama had no choice. He had to reaffirm his status as a bargainer. He had to respond. Hence his speech. And what made it politically difficult, what made it a backfoot move, what made it an attempt to rescue a campaign from trouble, also made it a great speech, an important speech, a moment of high emotion and political significance. That's the way with these things. You can't make a great oration to a local supper club on a wet Thursday. It's in the dock or on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial or at times of great tension and controversy you make great speeches. Because you know what the speech is about. Because you know why you are making it. It matters. And so, in the wonderful language he uses, but sometimes deploys to say little, Obama calmly and directly addresses race. He talks of his disagreement with Wright but also of his love for him. He says that Wright's anger is understandable but he disagrees with the pastor's idea - the challenger's contention - that America can't change. And then in a fantastic section he sweeps past race and says that it is a distraction. What should America do? “At this moment, in this election, we can come together and say ‘Not this time'.” I don't think this speech will disappear. It will endure. Like John Kennedy's speech addressing his Catholicism, or Lyndon Johnson's addressing civil rights, this speech will live. It will make the history books, in the chapter addressing the first serious presidential run by an African-American. Why? Not because it is necessarily a turning point itself, but because it will stand as the best expression of the idea that made Obama's candidacy possible, that made it viable. It will stand as a symbol of what he needed to do to make his campaign work. Did Obama write all this himself? His officials say that he did. But they always say that. There's talk of him dictating the first draft to his speechwriter Jon Favreau and the closing section, no question about it, was a long story Obama has used before. The central idea, though? Definitely Obama's. For nothing is more personal to him than his strategy for dealing with his racial identity. And by it his candidacy will live or die.