Video: Obama’s Race Speech “A More Perfect Union”
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, Barack, Race, VideoHere it is.
I agree with many that I’m glad he condemned Wright again, but didn’t throw him under the bus. That would have been craven. Instead, he showed class. Many will disagree with that, but if you knew somebody for 20 years and loved them and they said something particularly insane, would you discard them?
Also, commenter kritter points out a particularly good part of the speech that we should all consider…
We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina – or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.We can do that.
But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.
Then Barack, you need to make sure your spokespeople don’t pounce on every gaffe that Clinton’s surrogates make.
The change has to start with you, and it should start now.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, Barack, Race, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 18th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
I thought it was a brilliant speech. It was brave and hit all the right notes.