the audacity of hope
Sat Sep 04, 2004 at 11:30:07 PM PDT
I was just rewatching the New York Times clip of Barack Obama's keynote speech at the Democratic Convention...
God, it was just so good. One of the greatest speeches in import, in content, in tone that I have had the privelege of witnessing as it happened. Truly, Obama is a gift to our party and, I hope, as the next Senator from Illinois, he will be a pathbreaking leader for our nation.
But there's more to it than that, I watched that speech again for a reason....I think Barack Obama was laying something out for us that we ignore at our peril...
It's not EASY to try do what's right, and, at the same time, to play in the hardball world of American politics:
we all know that between the media and those who play rough, there is not alot of room for folks who aspire to speak the truth and work for justice in the American political system.
Let's be honest. Barack Obama, a state legislator from Illinois running for a State-wide Federal seat for the first time represents something pure and hopeful for all of us here. We see him and we think of so many things that he might be and do. He is such a powerful example of potential, of promise, of what we aspire to be as Democrats. There were things he said...a tone he took...in that speech that spoke to us. We felt here is a man who truly understands our hopes and ideals and the calibration of our aspirations, here is a man who can see our brighter tomorrow and the very real road we will take to get there.
I liked how Barack Obama grounded that hope to struggle....how he used the phrase..."the audacity of hope". Because, at its core, that is the tonic that we need to get in touch with right now. And I think we need to understand that, on some deep level:
John Kerry is very much like Barack Obama. John Kerry was a smart, skinny, ungainly vet who gave a speech that, if he had done nothing else in his life, would have made its own mark on history. John Kerry was the Veteran who made this speech over thirty years ago:
Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?....
You can read the whole text of that speech in a
history forum here.
What strikes me today, however, is a very real difference between Senator Kerry veteran of Viet Nam and the Senate and Barack Obama. In the intervening years John Kerry has seen politics in Washington up front and first hand. He's become hardened...he's seen the slime ...and the slime has shaped him. He's doesn't convey the same idealistic "audacious hope" that must have inspired him to write the closing words of his Senate testimony:
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission - to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so when thirty years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.
You and I both know, that a man who could stand up and say that to the Senate after returning from combat in Viet Nam...a man who at that time we can be sure had political ambitions, but was essentially a promising nobody...knows something to this day about the audacity of hope.
I trust John Kerry, and I can hear that heartfelt hope when he speaks and in HOW he's trying to run his campaign.
I don't know if he's gonna win. I don't know if he's gonna do everything the way I would prefer if he does. He may be in the profoundly ironic position of being a war time President inheriting another President's war.
I do know this: the battle we are engaged in the election season is worth the effort we've put into it...and our candidates are very much worth fighting for. The folks who are sliming him..the folks who are distorting who WE are and what WE stand for by attacking him...are not going to do anything different than what they've done for the last thirty years.
And the media aren't going to bend over backwards to help us out.
But...friends...it's September..it's Kerry/Edwards, and if there's one lesson we all here should have learned this election cycle it's this: nothing matters so much as when people really start making up their minds.
Not the polls, not the tempests in teapots of cable news, not the malarky of the riling bloggy waters. If we do what is right..and we fight the fight we've been given to the best of our abilities then we have earned the right to an audacious hope. We're not going away. We're not going to stop fighting.
Despite all the turmoil and the rough poll news, I can honestly say I am glad I am in the same party as Barack Obama and John Kerry. And I am proud to think that, on some level, I share with all of you here, the kind of hope that Kerry and Obama speak of.
Let's go out and kick some GOP ass.
Permalink | 31 comments