In the not-too-distant past, I wrote a somewhat extended piece (that I never got around to publishing on this site) about the limitations of talking about progressive or liberal ideas as a series of policy proposals that would, by the mere dint of their superiority and appeal to voters' issue preferences, somehow be heard over the din of the trivial in the traditional media and over the clutter and detritus strewn about by the Republicans' noise machine.
I suppose that this is territory that others have tread in somewhat different ways before me, and I don't want to rehash all of what I wrote in the past or the theory behind what I argued (it was largely grounded in the writings of early 20th century pragmatist-progressives like James Dewey and William James), but I do want to share what I wrote about Barack Obama and what I saw in May 2006 as the promise of his rhetoric and how that promise has come to fruition during this campaign, especially with the Philadelphia speech on the place of race in American history called "A More Perfect Union."
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