Todd Gitlin, of Columbia University
First, Obama took the high road, which is also the long and demanding road. He refused to "move on" with a cursory acknowledgment that "mistakes were made." He did not acknowledge. He preached and he reasoned. The law professor was in the pulpit. He refused to settle for sprinkling what have become the automatic contemporary word-drops of "distancing." It will still be possible to parse his words for insufficiencies of denunciation, but Obama’s gamble was that he could turn Wright’s damnable sins into a pivot for a sermon about how the past can be overcome, about how American it would be to accomplish that hard and necessary objective. "We may have different stories but we hold common hopes"–that was the theme. I don’t know if this is true, but we will find out whether it is what America needs to believe.
And finally, the temperature of this speech is one of its messages; or should I say invitations? Obama kept his cool and turned up the heat at the same time. For those who have not yet voted, and crucially to the superdelegates, he raised the stakes, asking them all: Can you, too, keep your cool and your heat at the same time? The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, he said, had spoken in an "incendiary" manner, but Obama offered himself as the man who rises from flames and invites you to rise from your own. He took a grievous embarrassment and moved his lesson to the plane of prophecy. Talk about hope; talk about audacity. Tears came to my eyes. I don’t think I’m especially hard-hearted, but I cannot think of another time when the speech of a presidential candidate watered me up.
With that, Obama broke with the pattern, played out by both major contenders for the Democratic nomination, of distancing themselves from controversial supporters, applauding their resignations and plunging back into the talking points. Obama used the constant harping on Wright’s strident remarks as an opening to delve into the thorny complications of race in America.
Afterward Obama’s aides applauded the speech as a way to take control of the narrative on race—and weave into it the story of his own life. "He has wanted to make this speech for a long time," says David Axelrod, Obama’s senior strategist. "The question was when. He knew this was the right time. The firestorm about Wright and [former representative Geraldine] Ferraro meant that race was creeping up as a kind of dominant discussion." (Ferraro, a Clinton finance committee member, resigned her post after her own comments about Obama—suggesting he would not be enjoying such success as a candidate if he were white—caused a firestorm.)
Obama dictated a first draft to his young speechwriter Jon Favreau on Saturday, then reworked the speech until 3 a.m. Monday. He went at it anew on Tuesday, tweaking away until 2 a.m. Did Obama’s political aides try to warn him off the idea? "It wasn’t even a discussion," says Axelrod. "He was going to do it. I know this sounds perhaps corny, but he actually believes in the fairness and good sense of the American people, and the importance of this issue. His candidacy is predicated on the fact that we can talk to each other in an honest and forthright way on this and other issues."
He pegged Wright’s recreational alienation as wrong, as stereotyping, as a "profound mistake," as founded upon a canard that America has made no progress on race.
It must be understood what a maverick statement this is from a 40-something black politician. In the black community one does not sass one’s elders. One is expected to show a particular deference, understandably, to the generation who fought on the barricades of the Civil Rights movement. That is, to people of Jeremiah Wright’s vintage.
For a light-skinned half-white Ivy League-educated black man to repudiate, in clear language and repeatedly, the take on race of people like Julian Bond and Nikki Giovanni is not only honest but truly bold.
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