I got a chance to read over Obama's speech again (full text here), which gave me a better chance to evaluate it on not just delivery, but on merits. I find Obama to be a good speaker, but I don't think he's amazing. Whenever I hear or read people raving about how moving he is as a speaker or how much he sounds like a "black preacher," I often fear it's just a slightly more socially acceptable version of remarks about how "articulate" he is, which I touched upon a while ago. He is a good speaker, yes. But today's speech was not remarkable for that reason. It was a bit too long. It plodded at times. Some have said it tried too much to offer historical contextualization. But what it did, like no speech before it, was lay out the reality of race relations in America today. I've never heard this kind of candor from a politician, perhaps because there has never been a national political figure in the position to speak so eloquently on the state of race relations in our country. It was stark. It was honest. It touched upon the anger, mistrust and resentment among both the black and white communities of this country in ways that aren't often even acknowledged privately and definitely not spoken of in the public sphere, at least not by leaders at his level.
One of the challenges with a speech like this is, as Mark Hemingway notes on The Corner (yes, I am agreeing with him, but only on this point), that there are no ten-second takeaways for cable news to play on loop. I also agree with Michael Crowley in that the speech probably wasn't what crass electoral politics demand.
But most of all, I agree with Addie's assertion that this was the most important address on race since Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. King's speech may have been more powerful rhetorically, but this speech really laid down the complexities of race in America in a way that someone with Barack Obama's experience can appreciate uniquely. As I said earlier, it was the appropriate response not just to the Wright flap, but for framing the relevance of his candidacy. Regardless of what happens in this campaign, this will be a speech that I play for my children one day to give them an understanding of what race relations in America were like in 2008. In that regard, it was truly a landmark, and I hope that when I do get to play that speech for my children, things are different here.
--Kate Sheppard
