Obama delivers speech on race and politics!

[Bono's shades]

Originally posted by Irvine511
a narrative is growing online,

that this was one of the great political speeches.

and it might not be "enough" to prevent the damage done by Wright.

but one thing is certain.

he has not been Swift Boated.

I agree with this somewhat.

I just saw a replay of a little bit of Obama's speech on TV.

Wow. I was really moved. It also seems he's been getting rave reviews for it.

He really does seem like he's got the same protective layer of Teflon that Reagan and Bill Clinton had.

But I wouldn't count out the rabid Obama haters just yet. I think they are just waiting for him to get the nomination before they really, truly go after him. And I'm afraid it's going to be extremely ugly.

[Irvine511]

Originally posted by deep


and why are we caring about what Republicans want or wanted?

they had an effective leader.

in Obama,

the democrats will have an equally effective leader.

[Irvine511]

i can't not post this:

[q]I hope I am wrong, but it is very possible that Obama's speech cannot convince those that need convincing the most, particularly in November.

What does this all tell us? If I'm wrong, and I could be, then the nation may be ready to move forward on race, or at least put race aside and tackle the issues that affect working and middle class people of all races. Many black and other people I've communicated with already think I'm wrong and that his brilliant speech was effective.

It restored hope among his supporters, and convinced many whom had been skeptical that there was more to the man than just hollow rhetoric. If the racialized anti-Obama campaign is effective, however, and one news source suggests that it already has been (while increasing the net likelihood that blacks will vote for Obama, 56 percent of voters are reported to say that his ties to Wright decrease their likelihood of voting for the Senator), it appears that only a candidate that is politically whiter than Senator Obama can win high national office.

What do I mean by politically whiter? Not that it would take a more conservative politician, but that it would take a politician who either has no ties or has renounced all ties with grassroots and activist members of the black community who hold conventional black political attitudes.

We all know (or are) members of the black community who are black nationalists, former black socialists, black feminists, liberals way to the left of most Democrats, and even the occasional black conservative. The great majority of us are exceedingly unlikely to denounce these family members, friends, and congregants. We may not talk about them in mixed company (as Obama hinted in his speech) because we know what type of ugliness will follow, but neither will we cut them loose.

Why?

It is not only because often when we look at them we see ourselves, or our former selves, but because we understand the deep, continuing effects of structural black disadvantage; because we have personally experienced slights that remain a quotidian part of the black experience (see today's outstanding essay on this website by Larry Bobo and Camille Charles for a more nuanced exposition of this reality than I could hope to provide).

If it really is too little, too late, the consequences of this reality are what one might expect. We can expect a black community even more disillusioned with American politics than it was a year ago, and a nation that is continuing down a reckless course toward racial disaster.

http://www.theroot.com/id/45336/output/print

[/q]

[deep]

Originally posted by Bono's shades
He really does seem like he's got the same protective layer of Teflon that Reagan and Bill Clinton had.

thank you for remembering Whitehouse had an occupant 1992-2000


now I got to wait for the Home Depot guys to bring my new kitchen sink.

[deep]

Originally posted by Irvine511
i can't not post this:

it is too early

to come to any conclusions

but that does jive with much of what I have been saying.

I have always said this election most likely will be won on the smallest of margins

in 2-3 states

and something as legitimate or not as this

can be the determining factor.

[U2democrat]

With typical politicians in a typical election, 2-3 states will be the margin.

With someone like Obama, we will see a different electoral map. New, different states will be in play.

[Irvine511]

Originally posted by deep


it is too early

to come to any conclusions

but that does jive with much of what I have been saying.

I have always said this election most likely will be won on the smallest of margins

in 2-3 states

and something as legitimate or not as this

can be the determining factor.

do you think

Barack Obama

would be a good president?

[yolland]

Originally posted by Irvine511
you know how churches love to take credit for the civil rights movement? that's 'cause of the black churches.

Yes. And not every preacher who inspired people to risk their lives by becoming actively involved in the Civil Rights Movement was as measured and reflective in their sermons as MLK.

I do understand and appreciate where people are coming from who feel sincerely troubled about what Obama's longtime membership at Wright's church might say about his judgment concerning social and political alliances. While I'm less sympathetic to the idea that other candidates' political ties to ministers who've said some pretty ugly things about Catholics, gay people, and America having "deserved" Katrina or 9/11 on account of "sin" can be safely dismissed simply because said candidates don't actually belong to said churches, I do appreciate the point that closer social ties = greater concern about undue influences. And I do agree with deep that it's inaccurate to suggest that some of Wright's more controversial assertions are merely garden-variety "black church rhetoric."

Still, I share Irvine's sense that there may be some pretty major disconnects at work here in grasping certain tendencies in how members of historically disadvantaged communities recognize and support each other and manage the identity balancing act of integrating those influences on self and community with a simultaneous sense of oneself as part of the broader community of American society. I can't speak from experience about being black nor a longtime member of a black church, but I can speak about growing up Jewish in a community whose elders' sense of Jewish identity was strongly shaped by the Holocaust on the one hand, and the often-uncomfortable 'white...sort of' social space Jews in the Deep South historically occupied on the other. As late as the 1970s, there were quite a few synagogues out there where it wasn't at all uncommon to hear what many today might consider paranoid or even hostile attitudes towards 'mainstream American society' expressed--from the pulpit, from the pews, in Sabbath school classes and at tea-and-pastries gatherings after services...from hyperbolic gossip about politicians, celebrities and organizations suspected of anti-Semitism to outright goyim-bashing, Arab-bashing, and obsessive preoccupation with Holocaust study as the sine qua non of Jewish identity. This despite the fact that the Holocaust had ended 30 years before and that nothing remotely like it had ever happened here to begin with. Now, most all of that has entirely faded away by this point in time, and certainly *one* reason for that was growing discomfort and alienation towards those who expressed such sentiments on the part of younger Jews, who'd grown up in a different world and held quite different perceptions of where the truly dangerous faultlines in US society and the world were. But those changes, for the most part, took place slowly, over generations, and through gradual, subtle shifts in what kinds of internal debates and discussions went on and what changes in the community's sense of its place and potential in American society occurred, through assimilation and advancement and so forth. None of which erased that sense of collective identity, but it did alter the collective sense of what sort of world we inhabited and, as a result, what a "Jewish" way of being and participating in and giving back to that world might look like. It certainly didn't happen primarily through individuals definitively and defiantly proclaiming, "Let's all talk love and uplift and self-reliance and Torah only, all the time--no more doom-and-gloom negativity, or I'm leaving!" Because those are your people, your blood, the ones who suffered and forged ahead with their heads held high through indignities you never had to deal with and clung tenuously together in order to make a better world for you, and though you often chide their resentments and pessimism and even sometimes feel like they're grappling with phantoms, you respect and admire and feel loyal and indebted to them nonetheless. That's not to say there are never lines drawn in the sand or refusals on principle to compromise, but it's never as simple as "I really didn't like a few of those spiteful accusations my rabbi's made towards Southern Baptists over the years--time to move on." That is a very individualistic, free-agent-monad-with-no-obligations-to-anyone-but-God way to think about it, and for better and for worse that just isn't a self-explanatorily, always and everywhere Wisest and Truest way to approach life or faith or community.

Again, I'm not saying there isn't a time and place for drawing a line in the sand, or that there's something innately noble and righteous about prioritizing loyalty to your "brothers," your faith community, or "the man who brought me to God." Just that it isn't as tidy and simple as "A good and wise man always cuts himself off from 'friends' with fears and resentments and distrusts he doesn't share--period." And that we need to be mindful of the paucity of references we sometimes have with which to make fair and reasonable analogies to other situations. Jeremiah Wright is certainly not much "like" Martin Luther King Jr., he isn't much "like" Louis Farrakhan either, and he certainly isn't just like Barack Obama. Who is, after all, the one who's seeking the Presidential nomination, and his books and speeches and voting record have been out there for many months now for all the world to see. This was, at most, a case of poor judgment about social alliances...with, I hope, the above qualifications about the kinds of alliances we're talking about taken into account.

[deep]

Originally posted by Irvine511




do you think

Barack Obama

would be a good president?

he is a cipher to me


His pick for Secretary of State is history.


I think he has the potential to someday be a very good if not a great president.

[deep]

Originally posted by U2democrat
With typical politicians in a typical election, 2-3 states will be the margin.

that is not typical

it has just been that way in 2000 and 2004

that is why it is a trend

I tend to believe.

also,

the polling suggest it

both in popular and electoral college vote polling

[sue4u2]

Originally posted by deep


that is not typical

it has just been that way in 2000 and 2004

that is why it is a trend

I tend to believe.

also,

the polling suggest it

both in popular and electoral college vote polling

Yes it has been, but regardless of the polling, which is skewed to say the least.
This election is different...
I wouldn't take anything the polls say as a reflection of the real electorate.. yet!!

[BonosSaint]

Definitely a strong and effective speech.

[yolland]

The Wright issue aside, I was struck by how honest and candid and direct this particular speech was--no BS feelgood rhetoric or facile sloganeering in there, and yet no fearmongering either (he wrote it all himself).

[U2democrat]

I know this sounds cliche, but it really did come from his heart. Obama wrote the speech himself, and he was up until 2am fine tuning it.

What we saw was, like his books, Obama unfiltered; the raw man, in what may be considered one of his best moments. A man who excercised a depth of knowledge of what's right and wrong about America.

This is the man I trust and want in the White House.

[2861U2]

I wasn't impressed as you guys are, then. I wasn't fond of the fact that he was clearly reading off of teleprompters. I think a speech so important and emotional needs to be very much memorized, or with a few notecards, and looking into the camera. Constantly turning his head to the right and left to read the prompter took some of the "from the heart" effect out of it.

[deep]

I caught the whole thing on C-span

shaky camera and all

I watched and listened to every minute of the whole hour


I have a few different opinions
some would be appreciated by his friends here

and some would receive quite the opposite reaction

the speech, first and foremost was for his base.

first thing, is to shore up the base
and then try to expand it

the speech was a success

how it played with others
I don't think it helped much at all.

[yolland]

It may not help "with others," but as Irvine said earlier, it'd be hard to imagine him having handled the present situation much better than he did. Even if he'd settled for a one-note blistering condemnation of his former pastor, the same "others" would still have found it unconvincing.

[Irvine511]

Originally posted by yolland
the same "others" would still have found it unconvincing.

with this speech, Obama became "black" for the first time.

the reaction will say far, far more about us than it will about him.

i am more convinced than ever that he is the best person for the job.

and if the blue-collar white democrats defect to McCain, then so be it.

it will, again, be our country's loss. we'd prefer a dick-swinging inarticulate ignoramus from Texas than an effete intellectual from Massachusetts.

we reap what we sow.

[Irvine511]

Originally posted by 2861U2
I wasn't impressed as you guys are, then. I wasn't fond of the fact that he was clearly reading off of teleprompters. I think a speech so important and emotional needs to be very much memorized, or with a few notecards, and looking into the camera. Constantly turning his head to the right and left to read the prompter took some of the "from the heart" effect out of it.

do you prefer the pause, the squint, the quick and pained remembering of how it was explained to him by his advisers, and then the awkwardly delivered phrase, "in other words ..."?

[diamond]

Originally posted by Irvine511



an effete intellectual from Massachusetts.

I thought Mitt bowed out of the race already.

dbs