Posted on 03/21/2008 8:11:38 PM PDT by indcons
'You kids!" my mother ritually despaired in my childhood. "You're so - negative!" That line has been a standing joke between my brothers and me for decades, ruefully repeated at my mother's expense. But she had a point. We were a critical bunch. On into my middle age, much of my non-fiction commentary has continued to deplore this, to ridicule that. I am still "negative".
Yet, like many of my American compatriots this week, I have been enjoying the unnerving experience of being for something. Of being encouraged. Of daring to believe that something in my country has improved. Of being deeply, unembarrassedly moved.
Can you imagine any British politician's campaign speech making the No. 1 most-watched slot on YouTube? Of course, videos of Rev Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's pastor of 20 years, made the top 10 on YouTube as well. The same clips of Wright's racially incendiary sermons have played incessantly on American cable news: a black minister describing 9/11 as the chickens deservedly "coming home to roost", invoking "God damn America!"
But the popularity of these videos is par for the course. They are disappointing. They suggest to some white Americans that the conciliatory black presidential candidate promising to unite the country has a darker, angrier face; that, by association with a pastor whom Obama still refuses to entirely repudiate, the current Democratic front-runner is one more chip-on-the-shoulder rabble-rouser who will only prosecute the grievances of his own race.
Because in Republican hands these clips might imperil his electability in November, the Rev Wright controversy might have had the potential to sink Obama's candidacy. Some candidates would duck or distract from such a PR disaster, but Obama took the bull ---- by the horns. This Tuesday, he delivered a speech entitled "A More Perfect Union", which for the first time in his campaign focused wholly on the issue of race in America. The address was inclusive, frank, rich, warm, and politically brave.
Where you will also find the kind of viewer responses of which Gordon Brown or David Cameron would never even dare to dream. "Wow. That was ------- beautiful." "Wow, he is the first real leader of my generation." "This was one of the best speeches in our time." "One of the greatest speeches ever made. I pray this country is intelligent and courageous enough to elect him president."
Punters are soft touches, or prone to exaggerate? Perhaps the website responses were bulked up by moles working for Obama's campaign? Check out the New York Times, then - which compared "A More Perfect Union" to the most famous oratory of not only John F. Kennedy, but also Abraham Lincoln. Mind, this is a newspaper that has endorsed Hillary Clinton.
Not enough? Even the recently defeated Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, profoundly conservative, on the religious Right, and now supporting John McCain, has commended Obama as having handled the release of the Rev Wright videos "about as well as anybody could". Indeed, so effusive was Huckabee that one TV interviewer joked that, if Obama was smart, "he'd choose you as his vice-president".
Long on the fence, Bill Richardson, the Hispanic governor of New Mexico and former rival for the 2008 Democratic nomination, was so impressed by Obama's address that he has just endorsed Barack over Hillary, describing the Illinois senator as "a once-in-a-lifetime leader". Thus may be put to rest the common Clinton charge that the untested Obama does not have the experience to deal quickly and effectively with the slings and arrows of outrageous political fortune in a general election. He has converted catastrophe to coup.
Julian Bond, a black civil rights advocate and former long-serving state senator in Georgia, where I went to high school, told reporters that the speech moved him to tears. I am not given to bawling. But when I watched the address, my eyes glazed more than once, and the hairs rose on the back of my neck.
I grew up in the American South. A white liberal, my father, too, was a pastor and civil rights advocate, who marched in Selma with Martin Luther King. I attended a swooning, mostly black memorial service in my hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina when King was assassinated, where my mother (who is given to bawling) cried. I'm not quite old enough to have grown up with separate white and Negro water fountains, but I was educated in a largely segregated school system, and went through the bitter forced integration of my junior high school when Raleigh schools were subject to involuntary "bussing".
I don't tout out these details to prove my bona fides - only to explain that I grew up with race, race, race, the sour, seemingly ineradicable residue of slavery. In other words, that speech meant something to me personally, something - my mother will be relieved to hear - positive.
I am proud that a black man is at last a viable candidate for the presidency. I am proud that, in the primary in Virginia - one-time member of the Confederacy and the state where both Robert E. Lee and my father were born and raised - a majority of white men voted for that black candidate. I am proud that the fact that Obama had a white mother does not seem to have put off African-American voters on the grounds that he is not "black enough".
I am proud that race relations in America have come far enough that Clinton-ally Geraldine Ferraro could notoriously insinuate that being black in a nationwide American election was an unfair advantage. I am proud that this freak of political nature, a candidacy that in my childhood would have been so far-fetched as to be farcical, is not just any old racial token, but is smart, classy, poised, and extraordinary.
After two terms of an inarticulate, tongue-tied president who repeatedly pronounces nuclear "noocyoolar" on national television, I am proud to back a presidential candidate who is more eloquent than any American politician of my adulthood. I am proud of Barack Obama, but most of all - for finally elevating such a worthy man as well as a worthy black man - I am proud of my country.
The author, Lionel Shriver, is probably a card-carrying member of the hysterical, maniacal, and shrill Democrat Underground hate site. Of course, there's an equal chance that he also blogs for Borat Obama at Daily Chaos or Huffington Post-Reason.
How could anyone be proud of Barack “God damn America!” Obama?
“But when I watched the address, my eyes glazed more than once, and the hairs rose on the back of my neck.”
Yeah, drugs’ll do that sometimes.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2005/aug/23/health.comment
Thats quite a pantload Lionel. Slap yourself back to reality.
I bet that he talks just like people do in TV commercials.
And this is what came out of Obama's bull!
I’m proud to be a typical White person who thinks that it was so sweet of Obama to throw his Grammie Cracker into a cesspool. How heartworming.
Well so was I! It was good to finally see a Black man who seemed ( at the moment) to be running on Character and ability instead of his skin color.
" I am proud that, in the primary in Virginia - one-time member of the Confederacy and the state where both Robert E. Lee and my father were born and raised - a majority of white men voted for that black candidate."
Amen to that too, because it proves the fact that "ole whitey" finally has moved beyond racial stereotypical ideas. How else could one explain the abundant support of this young man?
" I am proud that the fact that Obama had a white mother does not seem to have put off African-American voters on the grounds that he is not "black enough".
What? What did he just say? My what a short memory some have! They did ask if Obama was "Black Enough", and most of the Blacks polled in this country were supporting Hillary when all this started out.
The sad fact of the matter was that Obama, with help from the liberal media outlets, was hiding the fact that he was a long time member of a Black Separatist Church. Why did he do this? Why hide his true affiliations? Simply stated, he knew that he could not gain the majority of the white vote if whites knew that he was of the same mind as say a Louis Farrakhan, or even an Al Sharpton. So he engaged in hiding his true affiliations.
Once again it appears that the Black community has snatched defeat from the very jaws of victory, and the majority of Black Americans will languish in self loathing and dejection, and yet again will fail to see that the only ones holding them back are the very Race baiter's they hold so dear, as their spiritual and political leaders; who will in turn, continue to scream in blind defiance, that it's the fault of " Raciest White America".
Dear Lord, for all our sakes, I pray that our Black brothers and sisters will soon get a clue!
Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to
prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent. In a remark that
seemed delightfully uncalculated [...], Mr. Obama described the
call to prayer as "one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at
sunset."
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/opinion/06kristof.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
http://nevadathunder.com/?p=3626
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