Why I'm for Obama
Any reasonable doubt that Barack Obama possesses an epic dose of presidential mettle, idealism, and daring was shattered in 38 amazing minutes Tuesday in Philadelphia in a speech he entitled “A More Perfect Union.”
Not since JFK, LBJ and RFK has a presidential figure talked to us in such honest, edifying and ultimately uplifting words about race, America’s most open sore. And, since Lincoln, nobody has done it better.
There were no soaring rhetorical flourishes here, no focus-grouped talking points, no succumbing to the pinched vision of the pygmy class of political handlers. Instead we were given the ultimate gift a candidate can grant us—an intelligent, highly nuanced address on an issue lesser leaders avoid except, all too often, to exploit for narrow, manipulative ends. And Obama offered it with the faith that we are adult enough to handle it.
It reminded me of the day in September, 1962, when I was a young Army private in the Jim Crow South, and Jack Kennedy stirred me to the marrow of my bones by going on national TV and radio to explain why he—we—had a moral obligation to desegregate George Wallace’s schools and why he had federalized the Alabama National Guard to do it.
Seizing his own “teachable moment,” Obama set the diversionary controversy over his former pastor in the broader context of what Americans of all hues and ethnic and religious backgrounds must do to redeem the stake we have in each other and create that “more perfect union.” (Contrast this, please, with John McCain’s tolerance of televangelist Rod Parsley—his “spiritual adviser”—a man who believes Islam must be destroyed by Christian warriors and called Catholicism a “great whore” and “false cult system.”)
Lest anyone think it is reflexive for me to eschew the Clinton campaign, Bill Clinton generously returned to Oregon in 1992, long after he had sewed up the state’s electoral votes, expressly to help me in my Senate race against Bob Packwood. I’ve always remembered his generosity with gratitude. Although I have never met Hillary, I’ve been loyal to her as Hillary haters tried to destroy her.
But, as my old colleague, Bill Richardson, said today as he campaigned for Barack in Oregon, Obama is a “once in a lifetime candidate.”
The nation’s only Latino governor may have had in mind what Jon Robin Baitz wrote in the Huffington Post about the Obama revealed by this speech. “This, then,” Baitz wrote, “is what it means to be presidential. To be moral. To have a real center. To speak honestly, from the heart, for the benefit of all. If there was any doubt about what we have missed in the anti-intellectual, ruthlessly incurious Bush years, and even the slippery Clinton ones (the years of “what is is”), those doubts were laid to rest by [Obama’s] magisterial speech—a speech in which he distanced himself from a flawed father figure, Reverend Wright, and did so with almost Shakespearian dignity and honor.”
Just so. It’s Obama for me.
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