Recently I've been noted for delegate math and caucus day/primary day diaries.
But on this day, the day of what I hope will be a heroic speech, I find myself more emotional than usual.
My favorite diarist is kid oakland. (Sorry, everybody else. It's not you, it's him.) Maybe it was this diary that got me going, or the awareness that when Obama speaks this morning, it might be a speech we remember a good long time.
Maybe those things, and this:
Obama's moment today is not triggered by a moment of violence, as Kennedy's speech was. But the forces that cause division among Americans that can lead to violence are the same insidious forces of fear, mistrust, and misunderstanding as the ones that threaten to damage Obama's campaign today.
The closing lines of Kennedy's oft-quoted Mindless Menace of Violence speech are:
But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.
Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.
We have a choice in this country. We can continue toxified as we are, we can allow the forces who profit from our division to continue to get away with lobbing stinkbombs into the middle of our politics.
Or we can choose a new path. It is literally up to us. Obama can provide leadership as President. He can speak words that inspire us to embrace our better angels. But in the end it is up to us.
In a campaign that is about asking ordinary Americans to re-engage in our public life or risk the catastrophic consequences of neglectful inattention, only we Americans have the power to decide whether we will embrace our dark doubts and be ripped asunder, or whether we will see each others as brothers and sisters, and countrymen once again.
Barack Obama is my generation's Bobby Kennedy.
We can speak on other days about downballot races and grassroots organizing and healthcare proposals, transparency values and plans for fireside-like internet chats. Or a hundred other things.
But today I just want to keep it simple.
This is a visceral thing.
During this campaign season people have accused people like me of seeing what they want to see, of projecting onto Barack Obama a savior figure.
It's one of those insidious lies that gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on.
Unlike some others here who had personally met the man or lived in Illinois and followed the Senate primary, on that July day in 2004 I had no freaking clue who Barack Obama was. I'd never heard of him. Here comes this guy onto the stage that the pundits were saying was supposed to be perhaps a rising star in the party.
And so he gets up there and gives this unreal speech and I'm by myself cheering and weeping and jumping from the couch and finally I'm sitting there wondering who in the hell is that who just dropped an emotional bomb on my ass. I spent the rest of that night telling everyone in my Tuesday night poker home game that I had just watched someone who would be President give an amazing speech, the best I had ever heard in real time.
But it wasn't until I saw him on a one-on-one national interview program a couple weeks later, where he gave these just impossibly thoughtful, non-defensive answers to the same old gotcha questions that always confound other Democrats. It was like, here comes the minefield. And he didn't carefully steer through it. He simply rejected the premise that it was a minefield, in this beautifully centered, non-confrontational, yet non-acquiescent way. It impressed the living hell out of me, is what it did. That's when I really knew.
I wasn't some schmoe walking around praying for a savior to come. It hadn't occurred to me that there was such a potentially transformational figure in my party to begin with! There's never been one in my entire life, not one with the full package. People like Bobby Kennedy were not real, tangible pieces of my own history. They were people I'd read about in history books, and stories related by my parents.
See, this is one of the flaws with the argument that older people make about the younger people who see Barack Obama this way. For them, Bobby Kennedy was someone they personally remember. It is they who would be likeliest for "projecting" this RFK persona in a forced way onto Obama.
We don't have that analogy at our memory's grasp. We see what we see, and only then ask, what is this like? Well, it's like the stories our parents told us about Bobby, and about the similar themes they sounded in their public speaking, and the outpouring of feeling they provoked. It isn't really more complicated than that.
For people under about 50 (people 50 years old would have been 10 when RFK was shot), we really didn't inhabit a world where it occurred to us to want something back we didn't know we had lost in the first place. Instead, we see what we see and then go reference our history to find a comparison, becuase there hasn't been anyone this thunderingly skilled at weaving progressivism, patriotism, and spirituality into the American historical context together in a single message in my lifetime. If you doubt that richly textured combination, reread this snippet from the convention in 2004, for all of it's in there:
For alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga.
A belief that we are connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief — I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper — that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. "E pluribus unum." Out of many, one.
It is the precise antidote for all the "Liberals Hate America" and "Treason!" filth spewed our way, and it's the patriotism that hooks so many conservative voters who have been conditioned to believe liberals' constructive criticism = disloyalty to country. Obama is the neutralizer of all that giant bluff, one that props up a corrupt and dying ideology that has created so much misery in this country and around the world.
Progressivism + Patriotism + Spirituality/Better Angels + American historical context = redefining the political landscape for a generation. That's why people make Reagan references and not Clinton ones. Reagan moved goalposts, for evil and ill. But he moved them. (His formula was Conservatism + Patriotism + Fear of "other.")
By contrast, Bill Clinton accepted the goalposts' location as is (much as his wife's campaign aggressively accepts the red-blue 50+1 battleground map as is), and he tried to stay in the middle, even as the 1994 Republican wave forced the field even further rightward. We loved him because he was articulate and brilliant and drove Republicans insane, but political landscape-wise he didn't come remotely close to his 1992 campaign rhetoric. We can no longer afford safe, playing risk-aversely to the 5% middle boutique presidencies. Our problems are too big and imminent.
I see a deep authenticity and integrity in Obama. What others see as a naive quality, I see as the opposite. Someone who knows exactly what he is expected to cynically believe about the way processes must work because it is the way they always have, yet who intends to change a lot of unwritten ground rules that have led us down so many painfully wrong paths.
Which bring us to today, when he must give a speech that addresses the issues of race, religion, and what it means to be an American. More than anything, he needs to talk about what will happen in this country when we are divided, and what is possible when we are united. And the whole world will be watching what he says in this moment.
Even some of his advisers think it's a bad idea. They fret that once opened, the subject of race cannot go back in the bottle. And they are probably right. But what I love about this man is that his judgment is to bet on the American people, to let our verdict about ourselves be the verdict on his campaign. That is a true path of honesty, of integrity.
He is an aikido master, someone who takes the force of an enemy's blow, merges with that force, and then uses it against the enemy.
The question is not, is America ready for a black president?
The question is, is America ready for a wise president?