Is Obama imitating MLK style of speech?

[question everything]

The other day I caught some of a recent appearance (in Washington?) and the way he said "size" - stretching it "saaaaize," reminded me of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "seeen" in "I have seen the promised land."

Same cadence.

[emilyg]

1. He's trying.

He's no MLK

[K Gardner]

2. Oh. my. god. Try harder to be petty. Yeah, he's a real copycat, that guy.

[question everything]

11. Try harder to grow a thicker skin

Saint Obama cannot be commented at all?

Oh, by the way, he is black.

[jkshaw]

15. It should be, with all due respect,

"Saint Obama cannot be commented upon at all?"

[Kittycat]

3. drive by

[FrenchieCat]

4. Your coment sounds ignorant. If you stay on the South Side of Chicago

for any moment of time, you will start to sound like Dr. King, who sounded like many Black orators. You just haven't heard enough of them to understand this.

Obama has been going to a Black Christian church for over 20 years.....I'm sure that it rubbed off on him some, wouldn't you think?

My husband is a minister, and he has a similar cadence. But when he speaks normally, it isn't there.

Plus, if I were you, I'd pay attention to the actual words coming out of his mouth, instead of how he pronounces the words. .

[Donkeykick]

8. Excellent Point!

:thumbsup:

[keep_it_real]

5. Hell no!

[ShortnFiery]

6. No, don't cha know, all black men begin to sound like that, the longer you listen?

:sarcasm: :eyes:

[VolcanoJen]

7. i can haz cheezburger?

:eyes:

[jkshaw]

12. VolcanoJen

That's my absolute favorite site!

[VolcanoJen]

17. Haha!

Mine, too. :-)

[Guava Jelly]

9. Holy shit..you are so right!!!

He is a black man who speaks of hope..
What an asshole!!!!:sarcasm:

[Leopolds Ghost]

48. Not another black man who speaks of hope?

[blogslut]

10. At least he's not boring and uninspiring

But really, could you be more of an ass?

[ldf]

13. personally, i don't want a sermon out of my candidate

we have had enough of those who think they have the direct phone line to god.

as far as i am concerned, it is a reason NOT to vote for someone.

[FrenchieCat]

14. Than you should vote for the one with the Voice scratching on the blackboard.....

Obama is a great communicator. Deal with it.

[oasis]

16. MLK wasn't full of it. (eom)

[WillyT]

21. Believe Me... They Are ALL Full Of It... Just Some Way Less Than Others

:shrug:

[woolldog]

18. Not MLK per se

But that is how the preachers talk in the black churhces. MLK was a preacher in a black church, so that is why he had that style of oratory. Same with Jesse Jackson I think. Bill Clinton talks the same way when he's in a church or in the south.

I do think Obama should tone that down as it may come off as insincere. His roots really aren't in the black church or in the south, like Bill Clinton, Jackson, or MLK.

[Ino]

19. Check out Hillary's accent

... then we'll talk about Obama's.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zotg92j0U6I&NR=1

and here...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu9TQq0C3Ac&NR=1

[Straight Shooter]

20. Yes, he is. I noticed that the first time I watched a video clip of an Obama speech.

I called up a friend of mine, and said, "Listen to this video. Who do you think is talking?"

He listened for a minute and then said, "Martin Luther King."

It is known from long-time observers of Obama that he has a gift for being able to mimic speech patterns, for being able to slide easily from one form of speaking to another; it's his way of ingratiating himself with people who might otherwise feel uncomfortable with him. He probably studies MLK speeches extensively, imitating what he considers to be the most impressive inflections. And of course his evangelical rhetoric is classic MLK writ modern.

That's one reason I don't feel comfortable about Barack. Everything seems manufactured.

[woolldog]

22. StraightShooter

See my post above. Nothing nefarious about it.

[Straight Shooter]

24. He has the gift of mimicry. It's a talent. He's entitled to use it.

I think it grates on me because I'm a great admirer of MLK and if Obama is using it to subconsciously influence people, well, I just have a problem with that.

But that's for Barack's conscience to decide whether he's exploiting the power that MLK still has to make people believe in a dream.

[woolldog]

26. Straight Shooter

My point was that MLK doesn't have a monopoly on that speech style. It's more of a southern black preacher thing than an MLK thing.

[Straight Shooter]

28. woolldog

My point is if it's a deliberate attempt to mimic MLK, I have a problem with it, especially since I was raised in the South and am rather attuned to Southern accents. In my current job I spend all day listening to voices. I don't see their faces, I only hear their voice, so I'm sensitive to patterns.

As I said, though, it's for Barack's conscience to decide if he's exploiting the memory of MLK. It would be interesting to compare Barack's speech patterns as he moves from state to state.

[woolldog]

29. yes I understood what you were saying, and I responded

My response is that it's not an imitation of MLK, but an imitation of the black southern preacher tone. You can find preachers using that tone every Sunday from Los Angeles to Alabama to New York.

What you don't seem to realize (maybe because you've lived an insulated life and haven't spent time in black churches) is that that rhetorical tone isn't uncommon and encompasses so many more people than MLK.

[Straight Shooter]

34. I understood your response. I am fine with how you perceive his speech. However ...

... Insulated life? Let me quote Chris Matthews .... HA!

There is no animosity between us, not going to make a mountain out of a molehill, here. :)

[LowerManhattanite]

35. Precisely!

I studied public speaking/oratorical skills many years ago and that “style” is quite emblematic of African American large-scale oratory.

MLK used it.

Malcolm X used it.

The great Adam Clayton Powell (maybe the best of them all) used it.

Les Brown, Calvin Butts, and the countless Reverends and public speakers (including the un-seminaried ones I've seen on street corners all over New York) use it.

It ain't about MLK...it's a sense-memory cultural touchstone many African Americans draw from when speaking in instances like these.

Pretty damned simple, really.

[ecstatic]

23. I don't know. MLK died before I was born

Dangit. That darn generational gap again :spank:

[Straight Shooter]

27. That's no excuse. Start here, with the link I'm giving you. Then keep searching.

We lost a great leader. We don't make jokes about it.

http://www.npr.org/news/specials/march40th/speeches.html

[riverwalker]

25. and people died? n/t

[NOLALady]

30. That Obama is a sure nuff copy cat.

He's also imitating MLK's skin color.

[chascarrillo]

37. Bwah!

:rofl:

[jody]

31. IMO yes. n/t

[MethuenProgressive]

32. When Clinton quoted an old Negro Spritual, she was attacked here as a "phony"

To be honest, when I hear Obama going all Pastor Dollar, dropping in his "ya'll"s and "Pookie and Ray Ray"s, I feel he's being a phony, too.

[QC]

36. Perhaps he went to prep school with Pookie and Ray Ray.

or maybe Harvard.

[Oak2004]

39. Have you ever lived "between" two accents?

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago (Polish-Slovak-Irish working class neighborhood), then moved to the Northeast, spending the most time just north of NYC. I've now lived in the Northeast longer than I lived in Chicago. I have, nornally, what I call a Northeast modified Chicago accent, and I usually speak in a more formal, educated, manner. Most people don't recognize it as a Chicago accent, even Chicagoans I meet casually.

That is, until I return to Chicago to visit family. Suddenly I'm transformed into a speaker of South Side white ethnic English, complete with the soft t's and "Sairdays" and the "gunnas/wannas/etc" of the accent of my childhood. It's not intentional. I'm surprised by it when it pops out of my mouth.

There's a flip side to this transformation. When I visit NYC, my accent shifts in the other direction, towards a New York accent. Unlike the first accent I never quite pass for a NYC native, but when I've mentioned I lived "upstate", people in NYC assume I'm a native upstater. This transformation in my accent is equally unintentional.

Barack Obama might be willfully feigning the Black preacher style. Or he might have absorbed the style, and lapse into it unintentionally when delivering speeches. Or it might be something in between -- he might have naturally slipped in and out of it, and his handlers might have said "Great! Now lets work on this to make it consistent".

Barring information to indicate exactly which of the above it is, I prefer to keep an open mind.

[question everything]

40. Interesting thing, though, is that Obama does not have the "typical"

black accent, like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, or even Donna Brazile.

When I close my eyes, I would not know that he is black - at least, at the beginning. His voice, of course, is now quite familiar.

A story about his campaign people when first went to South Caroline, they had to show voters a photo of him to convince them that, yes, he is black. And brining Michelle Obama, with a darker skin, also helped.

And, in contrast to some of the knee jerk reactions here, I just asked, was not sure.

While I did spend time in Chicago Hyde Park, I did not attend black churches.

[Oak2004]

44. He wouldn't -- the "black" accent is a deep Southern accent

You hear it in more northern states largely as a result of the the great migrations northward after emancipation and especially during and after WWII.

Normally a regional accent disappears in a generation or two after arriving in a new region. For example, my "Arkie" friend from California speaks with a classic California accent, though her parents speak with a distinct Arkansas flavor and, she has said, her grandparents (who made the Dust Bowl migration to California) sounded like where they had been born.

The "Black" accent has not disappeared in the North so readily, because of segregation. Segregation has the effect of creating micro regions within regions, within which the prevailing accent is "black". If anything, the "black" accent has tended to spread among Blacks who have no roots in the deep South, but who have been segregated with others who share those roots.

Obama wouldn't have a "black" accent because he neither has roots in the deep South nor was he raised in a segregated micro community where such an accent is prevalent. He might pick up bits and pieces of "black" accent from where he currently lives, but it wouldn't be his native accent. He's not alone in not having a native "black" accent -- many other African Americans have grown up outside of segregated micro communities, and they sound like everyone else where they grew up. Still others did grow up with such an accent, but decided to rid themselves of their accent (or at least modify it) in order to get ahead in society. The ugly fact is that whites do respond more favorably to African Americans without a "black" accent (racism sucks) and I can't help but feel that accent modification is just another flavor of skin whitening.

[woolldog]

49. Good post

Oak2004. And also keep in mind that many blacks born and raised outside the U.S. don't speak with the typical black-American regional accent either. There are blacks in Britain who speak with an english accent, blacks in africa who speak with an african accent, etc.

The accent has nothing to do with genetics (just being black doesn't mean that you will speak in that particular way).

[Cameron27]

33. I think he is.

[Unsane]

38. so?

[bigtree]

41. It's the cadence of a Baptist preacher

which MLK also used on occasion.

[calico1]

42. Not necessarily like MLK, but like a

preacher at a Baptist church. This is one of the things about him that annoys the hell out of me...that he sounds like he is giving a sermon. I don't care for that at all.

[stillcool]

43. meow

[Disturbed]

45. Go find a audio speech by Malcom X then compare.

I feel that they are similar.

[stillcool]

46. Are you suggesting..

that Obama purposely alters his speech to sound like someone else..and if so how long do you think he has been doing this? Kindergarten?

[Bongo Prophet]

50. they teach southern baptist Obonics in the madrassas, dontchya know. Oy.

The lengths some will go to in order to marginalize -'tis a sign of insecurity, or a form of passive-aggressive fear, perhaps.

A few intelligent posts here, though.
I find regionalisms and dialects fascinatin'...
the rain in spain, know whut ah'm sayin'?

[stillcool]

47. I can't be bothered with this...

petty bullshit. Do you really think Obama is altering his speech to sound like someone else, and if so, how long do you think he has been doing this? Kindergarten?

[bridgit]

51. "imitating"? you mean like lately? or all along?

cause i say all along

[Levgreee]

52. MLK copied the style of every preacher... so no, there may be similarities

but i wouldn't say it's imitation.

[bridgit]

53. Not every preacher, not Kathryn Kuhlman, poster above nearer the truth, "they teach southern...

"...baptist Obonics" and so having stumbled by way of dancing about the subject that must not be addressed: racial variances, the only thing left to do is believe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jS_1EUwHVU&feature=related