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Philadelphia and Pittsburgh
Mar. 19th, 2008 10:17 pmListening to Obama's "More Perfect Union" speech on race, Tuesday, I couldn't help feeling just agog at the sheer improbability of the whole thing: not just that a black guy named "Barack Obama" is in serious contention for the presidency of the U.S., not just that he could so adroitly deflect that tabloid buzzsaw, but that he managed to redirect the conversation from shouted soundbytes to a serious talk about equal opportunity.
Obama being Obama, a lot's been said about the speech's inspirational language.
Wonk that I am, though, I think that I was most impressed by his sense of history and the accompanying social and political analysis*: his account of the legacies of slavery and segregation, his thoughts on white working- and middle-class economic anxieties, his analysis of the social and political consequences of each, and the parallels he drew between them.
Listening to that section of the speech, it occurred to me these are exactly the themes that Obama needs to hone in on in order to have a real shot at winning in Pennsylvania, next month. This is the balance that he'll need to strike to thread the racial needle and compete simultaneously in, say, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
To me, Tuesday's speech suggested strongly that he understands this, that he knows the words. I suspect that the real question will be whether or not he also knows the tune, knows how to put those parallels across in a less professorial, more kitchen-table kind of way.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say I'm cautiously optimistic.
(In the unlikely event that you haven't seen it by now, video of the entire "More Perfect Union" speech can be found here.)
*I have to admit that I enjoyed hearing Obama quote Faulkner, too--even though it encapsulated on several levels the aforementioned improbability: Can a candidate who quotes Nobel-prize-winning novelists actually be running for president? And if (as Faulkner said) the past "isn't even past" ... can an African American named Barack Obama actually be a serious contender for the presidency ...?
Obama being Obama, a lot's been said about the speech's inspirational language.
Wonk that I am, though, I think that I was most impressed by his sense of history and the accompanying social and political analysis*: his account of the legacies of slavery and segregation, his thoughts on white working- and middle-class economic anxieties, his analysis of the social and political consequences of each, and the parallels he drew between them.
Listening to that section of the speech, it occurred to me these are exactly the themes that Obama needs to hone in on in order to have a real shot at winning in Pennsylvania, next month. This is the balance that he'll need to strike to thread the racial needle and compete simultaneously in, say, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
To me, Tuesday's speech suggested strongly that he understands this, that he knows the words. I suspect that the real question will be whether or not he also knows the tune, knows how to put those parallels across in a less professorial, more kitchen-table kind of way.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say I'm cautiously optimistic.
(In the unlikely event that you haven't seen it by now, video of the entire "More Perfect Union" speech can be found here.)
*I have to admit that I enjoyed hearing Obama quote Faulkner, too--even though it encapsulated on several levels the aforementioned improbability: Can a candidate who quotes Nobel-prize-winning novelists actually be running for president? And if (as Faulkner said) the past "isn't even past" ... can an African American named Barack Obama actually be a serious contender for the presidency ...?
