Obama: Man in Full

The Barack Obama we saw on Tuesday was, to borrow a phrase he has often used during this campaign, the one we’ve been waiting for.

Senator Obama could have given a cookie-cutter, template speech on race relations in America. Like other politicians in the past, including ones I worked for, he could have talked about the challenges still confronting black America, casting a brief eye towards the past, while emphasizing the progress made over the past decades—the rise of the black middle class, increased black homeownership, reductions in poverty, better educational opportunities, etc. Senator Obama could have delivered a sermon similar to the one Bill Clinton gave in Memphis in 1993, and because of Obama’s oratorical skills, the media still would have declared that speech to be successful, he still would have been heralded as visionary and presidential, and he would have easily righted his campaign’s wayward ship.

That is not the speech which Senator Obama delivered. His was the exact opposite. Entitled, “A More Perfect Union,” the speech—which was really more than just a speech and more like a sermon, a lecture, a homily, and political address all wrapped into one—contradicted the media’s predictions, confounded many, angered some, and not completely solved his political problems. In fact, some have even argued, perhaps correctly, that his political standing has only worsened, for he has further aggravated the uber-important middle-class, blue collar, high-school educated, mostly exurban and rural white voters in big swing states that truly matter, such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. The media has claimed that Obama himself has been marginalized as “the black candidate,” to no fault of their own or to say the least of Senator Clinton’s campaign, either.

If the purpose of Senator Obama’s speech was to quell the controversy swirling around his former pastor, if it was intended to change the media narrative, if was supposed to reassure this niche voter—then it failed. Reverend Wright is still the Senator’s former pastor, the media are still talking about race and will continue to do so, and preliminary reports and polls suggest that the Senator has not completely regained his former standing. Those were not his objectives, however.

The Senator’s speech on March 18, 2008 revealed to the American people just how a President Obama would handle his duties as Commander-in-Chief starting on January 20, 2009. How would he confront the problems facing this country, how would he tackle the difficult and complex issues around the world? To use a Clinton campaign analogy, how would Senator Obama answer the red phone at three o’clock in the morning? The answer: he would be many things: thoughtful, inspirational, powerful, considerate, passionate, dynamic, historical, responsible, nonjudgmental, and sometimes even controversial.

His acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention was supposed to be when voters viewed him as the future Forty-fourth President of the United States. Not so. This past Tuesday, Senator Obama revealed himself in full to the American people as their president. Instead of delivering the “race speech,” as everyone in the media, and perhaps some in his inner circle, were predicting and hoping for him to give, he delivered his very first State of the Union. It was about our country’s challenges and its opportunities. It was about race and history, hope and prosperity, divisions and generations. He revealed that the state of our union for far too long has been in a “racial stalemate,” which has hindered progress on multiple levels, from the economy to education and health care. To overcome these challenges, he told the American people, we need to actually begin addressing them. Unlike in the past when we talked about race, where we merely presented a laundry list of wrongs and then accomplishments, we forgot to mention what still needed to be done. The penultimate message of his speech: electing him would be a monumental first step towards confronting and resolving these problems.

Great presidents of the past have not told us what we’ve wanted to hear, but what we’ve needed to hear. We needed to hear Senator Obama’s speech. Americans, old and young, of all races and ethnicities, upper and middle class and poor alike, needed to hear for the first time an honest assessment of the issues that have plagued this country for centuries. Du Bois famously predicated in 1903 that the problem of the twentieth century would be “the problem of the color line.” In his speech, Obama argued that this problem is still with us in this new century and that “race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.” If past Tuesday’s speech is any indication, Obama is picking up where Du Bois left off. As he put it, this “is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger.”

On a lighter, more gleeful note, Senator Obama’s speech was also a huge middle-finger to the elite press corps, right-wing talk radio, and the beltway chattering class. The days leading up to his speech, these card-carrying members of the Know-It-All Country Club had all been clamoring over him like vultures on a corpse. Their righteous indignation over Jeremiah Wright’s condemnation of America’s foreign entanglements was almost as apocalyptic and nihilistic as the Reverend’s Sunday sermons. With the speech’s first sentence, a recitation of the introduction to the Declaration of Independence, Senator Obama was signaling that this time something very different. It was as though he was saying to all them, “Fuck you. I’m my own man, and I run my own campaign the way I want to. And if you want me to talk about race, we’re going to talk about race in a way that has never been discussed before in this country.”

Senator Obama used words that make traditional politicians stutter and most voters cringe. Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, discrimination, black, white, bussing, affirmative action—these were all in one speech! It was striking to hear a major presidential candidate say that our Constitution “was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery.” It was even more shocking to hear him quote a major American literary figure, William Faulkner, who is not exactly a household name. Some in the press, most notably the dodo heads on cable, concluded that the speech was not successful because it didn’t speak to the “average” American. To which I responded, “Halleluiah! I don’t want a president who speaks down to people. I want one who lifts us up and challenges us.” As Peggy Noon put it in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Senator Obama delivered “a thinking man’s speech.” She was clearly not criticizing him, either.

Given his name, background, and biography, his lack of political, military, and foreign policy experience, and that his campaign has not centered around specific policy proposals—like health care, education, or the war—but instead one-syllable symbols—such as change and hope—Senator Obama’s candidacy has proven to be anything but conventional, textbook, or predictable. Provided the disadvantages inherit with this campaign—the fact that he has had to run against not one of greatest political minds of the past quarter century but two of the best, his other worthy opponents being current chairmen of major committees in the Senate, one past Vice-Presidential nominee, and the other a former congressman, United Nations Ambassador, Secretary of the Energy, and current governor—Senator Obama’s candidacy has hardly seemed cliché, a slam dunk or a shoe-in. If there is one lesson that we can already take away from the Senator’s campaign, particularly after Tuesday’s speech, it is this: unlike his opponents, Senator Obama has demonstrated exactly how he would carry out his duties as President of the United States.