Obama’s speech on a ‘more perfect union’
On Tuesday, March 18, Obama gave the speech above (full text) and it’s set the internet(s) ablaze with conversation. Imaginably, that is entirely what he intended.
It is an important speech. Some call it the most important speech on the state of politics, race, and class in the United States in decades.
Glenn Greenwald said of the event, it was “riveting, provocative, insightful, thoughtful and courageous — courageous because it eschewed almost completely all cliches, pandering and condescension, the first time I can recall a political figure of any significance doing so when addressing a controversial matter.”
Directed at Americans, the “More Perfect Union” declaration resonated with a wide spread of people, as well. On the speech, Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber writes,
I’ve lived in the US for the last four years as a permanent resident, and been quite happy here. Hearing Obama speak made me feel for the first time that I genuinely want to become a citizen of this country and a part of the larger project that he talked about, regardless of specific disagreements I might have. You hear a lot of guff in politicians’ speeches about how great America is; Obama seemed to me to be challenging America to be great, which is a very different and much riskier thing, as well as something I find much more compelling and attractive.
But how does this fit into the race for the Democratic nomination, and ultimately, the General Election? In many ways, it was a clarification of Obama’s campaign for President and the manner in which he continues to distinguish himself.
Greenwald agues that THIS speech marks the change that Obama and his entourage have been talking about. His change is not necessarily a change in NAFTA policy (it’s not) or demilitarization (it’s not) but a change in the nature of political discourse in the United States.
The truly distinctive and “change”-oriented aspect of Obama’s campaign lies not in any new or exotic policy positions — his views on the Middle East, for instance, are often as conventional as it gets. What is distinctive is the far more consequential assumption that Americans want and are able to engage an elevated and more noble type of politics than the depressingly familiar garbage spewed from the Rush Limbaugh Show, The Drudge Report, Fox News, the cable news media stars, and all of their cooperating media and political appendages. We’ll know soon enough if Obama is right.
DCLaw1, as highlighted by Greenwald, argues that despite this speech, perceived of as “uncommonly genuine and intelligent” and possibly unintelligible to the “average” voter, it will help solidify an Obama success.
[This speech] will be precisely the gravitational force that draws superdelegates further into Obama’s orbit. And while some of those superdelegates may continue to hold their cards close to their vests late into spring, I believe that Obama won their hearts tonight, and it will take a miracle or a calamity for Hillary to swoon them to her side now. For Obama’s speech demonstrated to the Nobility at least two critical attributes: he showed not only that he can turn a snarling, unthinking Cerberus of political tumult into an opportunity for dialogue on the very themes that undergird his person, but that he can do it in a strikingly candid and impressively balanced way.
The speech demonstrates a maturity and morality that must, too, be implemented in his Presidency if elected. In contrast, Obama clearly marks out a lack of vision and collective challenge as offered by Canada and Alberta’s depressing and languishing leadership. Obama’s vision of discourse offers, perhaps dangerously, “HOPE”. An Obama-branded HOPE that comes at a time when the United States seems hopeless: rights wrenched away from its citizens; an eviscerated economy and an enriched and aggrandized corporatist elite; a reputation everywhere for dishonesty, selfishness and ignorance; and millions of innocents dead and brutalized in the wake of its terror-profiteering.
Disgraced Eliot Spitzer, now-former Governor of New York remarked as he resigned this past week:
I go forward with the belief, as others have said, that as human beings, our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
Good luck, America. You might not get a better chance to rise than with this Senator.
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