Waiting to exhale Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now resides in Jamaica. This is the second in his Sunday Stabroek series on the US presidential election.
By Wayne Brown
And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story…
(Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father: passage cited in his address last Tuesday.)
I can no more disown [Reverend Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother…a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me.
(Obama on Tuesday)
Perhaps it was always going to come to this: Barack Obama, the ‘post-racial’ candidate for the Democratic nomination, hounded at last into giving what many would call afterwards the most important speech on Ameri-can race relations since Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream,’ but a speech which, the Clinton camp is quietly betting, may yet mark the moment when they ‘got him.’
Mercilessly yoked, by endless replays of them on TV and YouTube, to his ex-pastor’s inflammatory and at times paranoid denunciations of American racism, Obama faced his deer-in-the-headlights moment last week. By the time he was finished, it seemed to some awed commentators that he had risen up ‘as on wings.’
The LA Times’ Tim Rutten averred that “No candidate for national office has ever spoken so candidly about race as it is lived as a fact of life in America”; and he went on to compare Obama’s speech to Lincoln’s ‘House Divided’ address, FDR’s ‘The only thing we have to fear’ speech, and Kennedy’s 1960 speech on Catholicism and politics.
The NYT’s Nicolas Kristof likewise compared Obama’s address to Kennedy’s, and called it “not a sound bite, but a symphony.”
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews called it “one of the great political speeches in American history,” and recommended that people print it and read it over from time to time – “like Huck Finn” or The Great Gatsby – because “it’s about us [ie, Americans]; that’s who we are.”
And the NYT’s white South African columnist Roger Cohen was inspired by Obama to himself produce a small masterpiece of a column. Wrote Cohen:
“Apartheid entered my consciousness as a kind of self-humiliation… I see white men, gin and tonics on their breath, red meat on their plates, beneath the jacarandas of Johannesburg, sneering at the impossibility of desiring a black woman. A racial divide, once lived, dwells in the deepest parts of the psyche. This is what was captured by Barack Obama’s pitch-perfect speech on race… Honesty feels heady right now. For seven years, we have lived with the arid, us-against-them formulas of Bush’s menial mind, with the result that the nuanced exploration of America’s hardest subject is almost giddying. Can it be that a human being, like Wright, or like Obama’s grandmother, is actually inhabited by ambiguities? Can an inquiring mind actually explore the half-shades of truth? Yes. It. Can.”
Cohen cited Mandela as “a reminder that leadership matters. Words matter”; and he declared: “The unthinkable can come to pass. When I was a teenager, my relatives advised me to enjoy the swimming pools of Johannesburg because ‘next year they will be red with blood.’ But the inevitable bloodbath never came. Mandela walked out of prison and sought reconciliation, not revenge…”
From the American heartland, however, with its untold legions of male white blue-collar workers, its ‘Reagan Democrats,’ the verdict was not yet in. Obama’s poll numbers had slipped fast over the weekend of the hysteria-creating Reverend Wright video. The first polls to emerge after his Tuesday address suggested that that slippage had stopped, but not (yet?) been reversed.
Obama: “This belief [in America] comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story. I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas… I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents; and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”
Or as America’s poet Walt Whitman wrote 150 years ago: “I am large; I contain multitudes.”
Belief in the decency of Americans had, inescapably, been the rationale of Obama’s run for the Presidency all along, of course. And as the first 26 Democratic contests came and went, and his lead over Hillary Clinton, both in delegates and in the popular vote, lengthened out, it seemed an inspired reading of the changed, ‘washed clean’ mood of Americans after seven debasing years of Bush and Cheney. But in the wake of the media’s manic replaying of the Reverend Wright video last weekend, Obama’s faith suddenly seemed a hold-your-breath gamble.
It took The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart to nail the size of the revelation that might be at hand. Turning to the camera, Stewart reported that on Tuesday March 18, at 11 am, “a leading candidate for President of the United States talked to the American people – as though they were adults!” And Stewart opened his eyes big in a parody of frazzled alarm.
Obama: These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
In many quarters, this eloquent presentation of the nail-holes in America’s hands drew an orgy of vituperation: Obama, they pointed out, had declined to utterly ‘reject and denounce’ not just Wright’s words but Wright himself.
The biblical references above may be inescapable in a primaries’ process that increasingly seems to be occurring in a moral arena, no less than a political one. Obama’s candidacy, as remarked, depends on the efficacy of his appeal to the better angels of the American psyche – this, even while the Clintons go on working tirelessly to unleash the worse ones. Only last Monday, Bill Clinton informed CNN that he had been “mugged” by the Obama camp over his Jesse Jackson remark in South Carolina. (As bloggers quickly picked up, “mugged” was of course a racial code word meant to trigger the same white anxieties about black crime as the subliminal message of Clinton’s “3 am phone call” ad, apparently so effective in Texas.)
Still, since Tuesday, Obama has seemed a man more than ever at peace with himself. Just as it quickly became impossible to watch his address without knowing that one was watching, not just a moment in a political campaign, but a moment in American history, so his mien since then suggests that, whatever the outcome of his presidential bid, this was the speech he was born to give.
And realizing that in turn gives a scale. Rolled under by the great onward sweep of history in which Obama’s Tuesday address seems destined to find a home, this feverish year and its outcome, too, shall pass
