Barack Obama # 1 of 2

Barack Obama # 1
cinops be gone Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Thank you Mark Steyn, syndicated columnist for the Orange County Register, Orange County, California for your article in the Sunday paper, May 4, 2008 “To Obama ‘we’ means ‘me.’”

Four score and seven years ago … No, wait, my mistake. Two score and seven or eight days ago, Barack Obama gave the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address, or FDR’s First Inaugural, or JFK’s religion speech, or (if, like Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books, you will find those comparisons drearily obvious) Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech of 1860.

And, of course, the senator’s speech does share one quality with Cooper Union, Gettysburg, the FDR Inaugural, Henry V at Agincourt, Socrates’ Apology, etc.: It’s history. He said, apropos the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that “I could no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother.” But last week Obama did disown him. So, great-speech-wise, it’s a bit like Churchill promising to fight them on the beaches and never surrender, and then surrendering a month and a half later, and on a beach he decided not to fight on.
It was never a great speech. It was a simulacrum of a great speech written to flatter gullible pundits into hailing it as the real deal. It should be “required reading in classrooms,” said Bob Herbert in the New York Times; it was “extraordinary” and “rhetorical magic,” said Joe Klein in Time – which gets closer to the truth: As with most “magic,” it was merely a trick of redirection.

Obama appeared to have made Jeremiah Wright vanish into thin air, but it turned out he was just under the heavily draped table waiting to pop up again. The speech was designed to take a very specific problem – the fact that Barack Obama, the Great Uniter, had sat in the pews of neo-segregationist huckster for 20 years – and generalize it into some grand meditation on race in America. Sen. Obama looked America in the face and said: Who ya gonna believe? My “rhetorical magic” or your lyin’ eyes?
That’s an easy choice for the swooming bobbysoxers of the media. With less impressionable types, such as voters, Sen. Obama is having a tougher time. The Philly speech is emblematic of his most pressing problem: the gap – indeed, full sized canyon – that’s opening up between the rhetorical magic and the reality. That’s the difference between simulacrum and genuinely great speech. The gaseous platitudes of hope and change and unity no longer seem to fit the choices of Obama’s adult life. Oddly enough, the shrewdest appraisal of the senator’s speechifying “magic” came from Jeremiah Wright himself. “He says what he has to say as a politician…. He does what politicians do.”

The notion that the Amazing Obama might be just another politician do seems to have affronted the senator more than any stuff about America being no different from al-Quaida and the government inventing AIDS to kill black people. In his belated “disowning” of Wright, Obama said, “What I think particular angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows that – that I am about trying to bridge gaps and that I see the commonality in all people.” (Continued tomorrow)
George H. Kubeck