"I can no more disown [the Rev. Jeremiah Wright] than I can my white grandmother," Barack Obama said in the most powerful sentence of his extraordinary speech about race on March 18 in Philadelphia, "a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me ... but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."
Too often in this campaign, Obama's rhetoric has been gorgeous but abstract, ear candy for the educated. But this simple statement, equating his black surrogate father and his white surrogate mother, was something any fair-minded person could understand: almost every one of us has an uncle or a grandmother good for at least two jaw-droppers every Thanksgiving. Yes, the Senator was comparing apples and freight trains: Wright's hate speech was as public and consequential as the grandmother's stereotypes were private, but Obama came to this comparison only after he had unequivocally condemned his pastor for having "a profoundly distorted view of this country."
The rhetorical magic of the speech—what made it extraordinary—was that it was, at once, both unequivocal and healing. There were no weasel words, no Bushian platitudes or Clintonian verb-parsing. Obama was unequivocal in his candor about black anger and white resentment—sentiments that few mainstream politicians acknowledge (although demagogues of both races have consistently exploited them). And he was unequivocal in his refusal to disown Wright. Cynics and political opponents quickly noted that Obama used a forest of verbiage to camouflage a correction—the fact that he was aware of Wright's views, that he had heard such sermons from the pulpit, after first denying that he had. And that may have been politics as usual. But the speech wasn't.
It was a grand demonstration of the largely unfulfilled promise of Obama's candidacy: the possibility that, given his eloquence and intelligence, he will be able to create a new sense of national unity—not by smoothing over problems but by confronting them candidly and with civility. Unfortunately, that hasn't always been the case. In recent weeks, he has been boggled twice by policy advisers who have been caught in the act of telling difficult truths—on trade and Iraq—that the candidate himself denied on the campaign trail. Perhaps now, having learned how cathartic truth-telling can be, Obama will summon the courage to tell Pennsylvania audiences that free-trade agreements like NAFTA have only a marginal impact on the loss of manufacturing jobs and that it will be impossible to end the war in Iraq in 16 months.
What, if any, impact will the speech have on the campaign? Probably not as much as it should. It was delivered in the morning, to a minuscule television audience. It deserved a full hearing, but most Americans heard it in sound bites and from headlines—and I imagine that for more than a few, the headline will be 'Obama Refuses To Disown His Anti-American Pastor.' This is where inexperience really hurts—not Obama's inexperience but the public's inexperience with him. For many Americans, the Wright flap is the third thing they've learned about Obama. The first two were that he is black and has a "funny" name. All too many voters don't get beyond first impressions, but it's not impossible. In 1992 the first thing most Americans learned about Bill Clinton was that he'd been shagging a lounge singer named Gennifer Flowers. The second was that he'd avoided the military draft during Vietnam. But Clinton—a politician as extraordinary as Obama—managed to survive and, intermittently, prosper.
Whether Obama survives now will depend on the most important and overlooked part of his speech—the final section, in which he challenged the public and, especially, the media to stow the sensationalism: "We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day ... and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words," he said. "But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election we'll be talking about some other distraction ... And nothing will change ... Or, at this moment in this election, we can come together and say, 'Not this time.'"
And that is the existential challenge of 2008: whether we will have a big election or a small one. Will we have a serious conversation about the enormous problems confronting the country—the wars, the economic crisis, the looming environmental cataclysm—or will we allow the same-old carnival of swift boats and sound bites? The answer depends on the candidates, of course, and on the media—where cynicism too often passes for insight. But most of all, it depends on you.
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