Obama's Speech

To hear the press tell it, Senator Obama's speech was something close to the Sermon on the Mount and the Gettysburg Address. For example, Courtland Milloy, a Washington Post "columnist" gushed "After hearing him deliver what was essentially a treatise on faith, hope and charity, I no longer wanted to risk getting stuck in a racial tar pit with Buchanan or any of the others. I just wanted to hop on that Obama bandwagon and head for a new America. (emphasis added) Mr. Milloy did no similar column after the speech on religious issues by then candidate Mitt Romney, which in many ways was more substantive.

I did not hear the speech. As one who started his career as a speechwriter, I like to read the substance of a person's words rather than he his rhetorical style. Mr. Obama is a gifted orator. But his speech left a lot to be desired.

In my mind there were at least two major issues where his speech fell far short or candor. The first was in moral equivalency. I understand that many in our society may express racially insensitive remarks. But to equate the private expressions of his white grandmother (who expressed fear at being in the presence of an unknown Black person) and Obama's pastor's outrageous remarks (arguing that the US caused the AIDs virus or any one of a number of equally absurd claims) is nonsense. Pastor Wright's statements were not the private expressions of someone with reservations about current conditions but the very public rants of a public figure. Ditto for the reservations that some Americans (including Black Americans) have about racial quotas. Objections to policies of racial quotas may be based on race, but a good many of the objections I have seen raised are based on efficacy of the policies. Can the same be said for Wright's comments justifying the attacks on 9/11?

The second was in moral fiber. It is odd that Senator Obama chose not to make the moral decision to leave his congregation. It is almost credible that he never heard his pastor make the range of claims that video has captured. But the fundamental tenets of Pastor Wright's "theology" which is based on victimhood should be troubling to any figure who claims to be trying to reconcile the American perspective on race. David Davenport, a former president of Pepperdine University and now a fellow in the Hoover Institution wrote an insightful column on the speech, where he described the painful decision that he came to recently to leave his own church over differences about its leadership. One wonders why Obama did not make even consider the same kind of decision.

Davenport compares Obama's campaign strategy to Muhammad Ali's "butterfly" strategy, where Ali would "float like a butterfly" ;ultimately we should demand more of our candidates. They should reveal a bit more about themselves than Obama did in this speech. The president cannot be all things to all people, in this case the Senator's speech tried to do just that.