Obama's historic speech on race is the beginning of what could become a majority coalition

[kpete]

Obama's Greater Challenge

These are not merely words, this is our history, and if we are large enough to rise to the occasion, now can be our time.

By Brent Budowsky
March 19, 2008

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In this guest essay, former Democratic congressional staffer Brent Budowsky hopes that Obama will venture even further and become a voice for the voiceless:

Barack Obama's historic speech on race is the beginning of what could become a majority coalition even more powerful than the New Deal realignment of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

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The great moral and political truth of America, as old as the battles between Jefferson and Hamilton, is the battle between those who seek to unite the disempowered and the disrespected, to achieve historic change, versus those who seek to divide them against each other, to defend a decadent status quo, to prevent historic change.

The great battles of history have been between the uniters, who want to uplift the vast majority, versus the dividers, who want to preserve the power of the few by dividing the many against each other.

The great battles of faith have been between those who share the common ideals of Jesus, Hillel and Luther about what Kennedy called "God's work on earth" and "the rising tide that lifts all boats" versus those who act as though “greed is good,” in which helping the dispossessed is called moral hazard, as though the few at the top have some right to watch the crushing of the many, in what is really a socialism for the few, and Darwinism for the rest.

What the powerful speech of Obama has begun, and can do, and should do, is to broaden the debate from a speech about race to a debate about justice, to elevate the dialogue from a discussion of discrimination to the aspiration for empowerment, for opportunity, for the pieces of the whole united as greater than the sum of the parts -- against those who divide the parts, to protect the few.


more at:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/031908a.html