Obama: "A More Perfect Union"

Barack Obama

On race and America...

(Image from CNN)

I have finally listened to Barack Obama's "More Perfect Union" speech.

While I do not entirely agree with every specific point that he makes, for he is more to the left than I am, I nevertheless sat transfixed by a nearly forty-minute experience of powerful political rhetoric, and I mean that in the good sense of the word.

I don't ordinarily have much patience with political speeches, but I found myself responding to Obama's extraordinary speech somewhat as one of my Berkeley mentors did to Obama's 2004 speech at the Democratic Convention:

Hearing Obama give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention was one of the most electrifying experiences of my political life. "Who is this person?" I thought. How is it possible for anyone today to formulate the very best of the American tradition in such eloquent terms? . . . . What impressed me during the last long year of campaigning was not so much his stand on particular issues . . . ; it was the way Obama framed where we are today and how we can move to a better place. In other words, what I first heard in 2004 has only become clearer in the past year: Obama, like no one I have heard in a very long time, understands our political tradition, how it has been distorted in recent years, and how we can return to it at its best.

Those are the words of Robert Bellah, written for the Catholic magazine Commonweal (March 14, 2008, Volume 135, Number 5).

While I also do not agree with Bellah on every political issue -- for instance, we have differed in our analysis of the roots to the Islamist attack on America on September 11, 2001 -- he is a friend, and I share with him a wholehearted response to Barack Obama's eloquence.

How, you may ask, can I wholeheartedly respond to these eloquent words of Obama, given his refusal to personally jettison Reverend Wright, who has uttered such inflammatory words?

Because Obama is right on this point.

If we don't choose our friends on the basis of ideology, if we don't select whom we will draw near and whom we will keep at arm's length on the basis of political correctness -- regardless of views leftist or rightest, whatever we consider 'correct' -- then we must acknowledge that we have people whom we love, people who have loved us and given us help and hope, who nevertheless hold views that we cannot accept.

That, I think, is what Obama was saying about Reverend Wright.

One of my great-grandmothers denigrated African-Americans during the Civil Rights Movement, utterly unlike my unprejudiced grandmothers reactions. Should I have jettisoned my prejudiced great-grandmother for that? She herself had married a man who was half-Cherokee and often commented on the injustice of America toward the American Indian.

Whose lives are not riven with such contradictions of the heart?

Now, that might sound like special pleading, but let me emphasize that I had left my judgement on this particular case in abeyance until I had listened to what Obama had to say, and in listening, I found myself nodding in response.

Does this mean that I'd vote for Obama this fall if he should be the Democratic candidate? Perhaps not, for I don't agree on everything that he says that he stands for -- restrictions on international free trade, for example -- and I'll never reveal my vote anyway, for reasons previously noted here at Gypsy Scholar, but I will acknowledge that Obama's unifying words appealed to my better nature.

Not that I expect that reason to be particularly compelling to others...