The next 24 hours feels like a playoff game suddenly, as much as any big state primary. A week of tension has been building, and the campaign has addressed it with increasing frequency, and frankly I don’t think they’ve done all that bad - but obviously Obama or someone close to him thought it was time to address it point blank. I think, in all honesty, its what I want to see - the Ebeneezer sermon of a response to all the deep seeded concerns that white people have about the way black people do or do not feel about them - which can’t be proved except I guess for some YouTube assault by self-anointed vetters. It was going to have to happen, to prove that the whole thing is real. That the post-________ world we seem to have been promised is really possible.
This is about something deep in a person like Obama - about not only the consequences a politician must face as a result of being the human being that they are, the product of their experiences and environment long before one public eye was fixed on them - but the way they then deal with those consequences. One major principle I have come to respect in a person like Obama is the cognizant way he dealt with the complexities of his experience and his identity. Indeed he wrote a brilliantly honest memoir about overcoming pretty much exactly that. Because you can be a product of something out of your control, like your upbringing, Life’s contests won and failed, or say - your race and all that entails - but you still get your chances, even make your chances to redefine who you are and what your life will be thus forth. As I began to mention before, I agree - I believe - that there is good and bad in everything. From a man to an idea to history itself, the content of your character is defined by whatever good - the purpose and the principle - that you can mine out of whatever life has provided you. That’s about as religious as I get. And it’s a struggle I haven’t won like I imagine Obama has.
However, if this speech is a playoff game… let me tell you that I am very excited about which pitcher my team is starting. The ultimate Big Game speaker. Just words gonna kick some ass.
Vandehei and Harris via Ben Smith:
Democrats who worry that Barack Obama is untested can put their concerns to rest.
The inflammatory rhetoric of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has confronted Obama with the most severe test of his presidential campaign and, quite likely, of his public career.
He is now facing a full-blown and fast-moving political crisis in which his reputation as a leader with a singular ability to transcend racial divisions and unite Americans is in jeopardy.
A convergence of factors — a media firestorm, a Democratic rival eager to exploit his stumbles and, most of all, a Republican opposition eager to rough up the man they expect to face in the general election — have raised the stakes to new heights for Obama with the speech he will deliver in Philadelphia on Tuesday morning.
The stakes really are that high. Obama (and Michelle, Axelrod, Favreau, et al.) has a blank piece of paper and one of the great challenges in the history of American politics in writing the speech tonight.
Sullivan, who’s been basically pleading for a speech like this: (this post is a must read of must reads by the way)
But I see Obama as a pioneer on this path - a brave and principled pioneer. I would think much, much less of him if he disowned a spiritual guide because of that man’s explicable if inexcusable resort to paranoia and racial separatism and anger. And I would think much, much less of Obama if he had never opened himself to this subculture and its fears, hopes and resentments. That he has done all this - while still attempting to reform and explain it - is a remarkable achievement. Maybe America is not ready for this bridge, for these contradictions, for this complexity. But the promise of Obama is that his campaign appears poised to show that America is ready for this - and the immense healing it would bring.
But he may also succeed - and what a mighty success that would be. These things are never easy; and we were lulled perhaps into an illusion that they could be. So now the real struggle starts. And it will not end with an Obama presidency; it ends with a shift from below that makes an Obama presidency possible.
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