Philadelphia speech

I wanted to write to my blog today that I thought Barack Obama's speech today, in which he addressed the concerns people have over his association with Jeremiah Wright, was a great speech. I was wondering how he would deal with this potential obstacle to his campaign, and I was truly and deeply impressed by how he did. In fact, I think it may be the best speech I've heard him give yet. I admire the way he took the issue head on, trying to actually explain his reasoning for continuing to be in the church and for why he can't completely disavow Wright, instead of trying in a fake way to distance himself entirely from Wright or put some facile political spin on the whole thing. I thought it was brave. He spoke to his audience in a way that respected their intelligence--that assumed they could try to grapple with this difficult point in a real way, instead of needing some little bumpersticker answer to the whole thing, some simplified catch phrase to make the whole thing go away. He actually talked to us about what was going through his mind and how complex the issue is for him. As I was listening, I realized that I almost never feel this way listening to a mainstream political speech. He was saying yes, this is hard to understand, and not completely pretty on the surface, but let's look deeper and try to understand.

The speech was substantive and felt genuine to me. What he said about the contradictions and painful divisions within communities we're part of made sense to me. The things that make us up are not always comfortably unified, and sometimes the people most intimate to us say things that make us "cringe," as he put it, but it would be dishonest to say that they are not still a part of who we are, to pretend a total distance. I also liked the way he tried to show the context from which Wright's anger arises, instead of trying to write him off entirely as a nut case. He showed that that anger has reasons and justifications, even if he also needed to say he didn't agree with all the specific manifestations of it in Wright's sermons. The speech (the parts in which he remembered the struggles and injustices black people have faced in this country) was also an indirect answer to Geraldine Ferraro's insane comments about how lucky he is to be a black man in this campaign, or he wouldn't be where he is.

I wanted this post to be a lot better, but I am too tired now after my long day to do better, so I will leave it at that. I just wanted to record how surprised, in a good way, I felt listening to this speech-- that it wasn't what I had been expecting. I think I'd been expecting something less honest, more like a superficially indignant, politically necessary, total rejection of Wright (what most candidates would do). What actually happened, what Obama decided to do, was so much better than that. It was the kind of speech that asks that its listeners be nuanced thinkers whose minds can grasp complexities and make sometimes unexpected connections, and I am soooo not used to that after years of listening to dull, trite, talking-points oriented speeches that flatten and dilute issues and talk down to us like children.