In what will certainly be the most talked about speech of the week, and could finally sink Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Sen. Barack Obama delivered impassioned remarks on the state of race in America, the pursuit of happiness, and his relationship with his long-time spiritual leader, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
The speech, in and of itself, is remarkable. After reading it, I couldn’t help but say, “wow!” It is full of moving rhetoric and soaring language, the likes we truly haven’t heard since Ronald Reagan.
For folks prone to being swayed by speeches (and for the left who will swoon because of all the political red meat it contains), this speech is a home run, and may even go down as a seminal moment in U.S. history.
But, at the end of the day, if you really look carefully at what Obama is advocating, you might want to think twice about your emotional response to the words.
This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.
Expanding the federal bureaucracy to the local level in the form of education reform.
This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.
The federal government has the answers to the issues facing the medical community.
This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.
Protectionism.
This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.
Isolationism.
Great speech — really scary policies.
Leslie Carbone has a unique take from Obama’s speech. She says that there was a lot of talking about the suffering of the black community at Trinity, but not a lot of focus on the cross.
DJ looks at the “new packaging” of old ideas and Marxist elements of Obama’s speech, and Obama’s subtle redirect to an “acceptable villain”…
For starters, Obama asks African-Americans, other minorities, and poor whites not to end their feelings of hatred and resentment, but to point them in another direction – towards an “acceptable” villain. Thus, Obama is just as divisive as his would-be critics, but since the division is one of class rather than race, it sounds (to some) to be unifying and healing. It’s not.
Mike at Write Side looks at things a bit more scripturally.
And, Reagan’s GOP notes that Obama states that the primary reason the Reagan coalition formed was based on race.
