The Real Risk Obama Took - Democratic Underground

Plaid Adder

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Wed Mar-19-08 12:58 PM
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The Real Risk Obama Took

I posted this in General Discussion, where it got locked for being too primary-y. I hope I am permitted to repost it here. First time I ever had a thread locked, so I guess Obama is truly the candidate of change.

We watched Obama's speech over the Internet last night--all 38 minutes of it. Because there are going to be a million people out there addressing the content, let me tell you why listening to that speech has convinced me that although he is certainly a politician and certainly calculating his words in order to win, Obama is at the same time in a different league altogether than the politicians we've been getting used to for the past 10 years.

After Edwards dropped out my partner got out Dreams of My Father and read it, figuring that since we were going to have to support Obama we may as well learn something about him. She reported that the book was interesting because it showed Obama thinking about race in an unusually nuanced and complex--and therefore actually useful--way, and that she was afraid that becoming a presidential candidate would force him to abandon that project and embrace the same crude, binaristic, distorted paradigms that shape the way the media and the political establishment talk about race.

Last night, instead of performing the "Sister Souljah moment" that the media were clearly demanding from him, Obama did something completely different. He laid out for anyone who felt like taking the time to listen a new paradigm for dealing with racial issues in America, one that actually takes into account the enormous complexity of this country's racial and ethnic makeup, the failures of American history and democracy, and the links between racism and forms of economic injustice that I have long despaired of hearing any American politician, let alone a viable presidential candidate, address in any kind of useful way. Instead of just stringing together a bunch of sound bites that would defuse the manufactured political crisis du jour, Obama took his 38 minutes--an eternity in the world of broadcast news, though it's about ten minutes shorter than the average lecture in the average college classroom--and he actually taught people something.

You know how we talk about not letting the other side control the terms of the debate? That's what that looks like.

It is a major risk, in today's media environment, not just to depart from accepted political cliches, but to take the time required to address an issue as complex as race in a productive way. I heard someone once attribute to Einstein the aphorism, "I believe that a theory should be stated as simply as possible--and no simpler." For the past eight years, and even before that, everything stated in the political arena has been stated much, much more simply than possible. Indeed, Bush's policies, like his speeches, indicate that he is completely incapable of grasping complexity of any kind. The 24 hour news cycle has generated a media culture that is well-matched to Bush's infantile approach to grown-up problems; anything that takes longer than 30 seconds to explain, so the conventional wisdom runs, simply cannot be said on television. And certainly it's not a good idea to introduce actual thought or new ideas into a campaign speech. Campaign speeches are about sound bites, and about footage of your crazed supporters cheering wildly.

Well, that wasn't a campaign speech. That was a presidential speech. It is headed not straight to cable news networks, but to high school classrooms, to rhetoric and composition syllabuses, and to the history books. It is the first successful attempt by a twenty-first century politician to define the inequalities that still fracture American society and to link racial injustice to the other forms of psychic and material oppression experienced by the vast majority of Americans--because of the consolidation of economic, political, and cultural power in the hands of 5% of the population, because of this morally insane and economically ruinous war, because of the spinelessness of lobbyist-owned politicians who think it's more important to keep the health care industry happy than to keep their constitutents healthy, because the manufacturing economy that sustained the working class has disappeared and because the middle class is severely threatened. It is the kind of thing that most presidential candidates either cannot do or will not do because they consider it too dangerous to ask Americans to listen to anything they haven't already heard, or--heaven forbid--to think about what they're hearing.

This particular speech was not punctuated with the same wild audience enthusiasm that you typically hear at an Obama event. That's not because they weren't feeling it. It's because they were actually listening to what he was saying. And that's because they knew that something important was happening, and they didn't want to miss it.

I cannot tell you that Obama is the next president of the United States. Anything can happen. But that is the kind of speech that a president of the United States *needs* to be able to give. And it took a lot of courage to give it, because he was taking a risk that almost no contemporary American politician has been willing to take. He told people something completely different from what they were waiting to hear, and he took his time doing it. It was a major gamble, and he should be applauded for making it.

I sure hope it works.

Because if it does, it won't just mean that Obama wins the nomination and/or the general election, or even that an Obama administration, should we be vouchsafed one, would actually go after the structural problems he elaborated. It will mean that Americans have figured out that we need to get nuance and complexity and intelligence back into our public life. It will mean that enough of us have figured out that while President Homer may be hella sympathetic and immensely entertaining, he's a disaster on the job. It will mean that Americans have had enough of being talked down to and patronized, and that they are willing to rise to the challenge that speech presents. It will mean the end of the Age of Rove.

Dare we hope,

The Plaid Adder