Ok, so after jotting down my notes on Obama's speech yesterday, it was back to business on this stuff. A partner and I trade the large cash markets in Curacao and Ireland in political futures and have been sitting net-long Clinton but at a favorable price, a free-roll on Gore and Edwards as compromise draftees, but too much weight. We've wanted to unwind some but not having to lay -300 with Obama.
My partner and I make it a point to read everything we can from the biased and un-biased sources. I generally follow the CNN coverage and he has the unenviable task of following FOX. We discuss where we're at in the wee hours over IM or skype, a little review and preview.
I had assumed that Obama would do his usual number, 15 minutes of "post-partisan, post-racial" gobbledy-gook and more or less step on his dick, leading the media to push harder on this new meme: why is he so evasive? Could her attacks be true?
I departed, though, from usual practice and merely listened to the entire podcast of the speech while I did other work. I listened to no punditry before nor immediately after. I had also seen very few of the Reverend Wright clips, save one that kind of made some sense to me. After I heard the speech, I IM'd my partner with something like "fucking brilliant, no?" He wrote back something like "best speech I've ever heard." We went into some of the minutiae of the speech and why we thought it was effective. You'll find most of that in yesterday's post here. My partner in this is a very well-educated and well-read guy and is even more cynical about politics than I am. We both agreed that the levels of sophistication, subtlety and elegance in Obama's speech were very, very high for any political speech either of us had ever heard. My partner's 9 years older than I am, and he'd heard many of King's speeches and felt like Obama's of yesterday stood up with some of King's best on quality, thought the styles were radically different.
We discussed unwinding everything at any price, assuming that the speech had been so well received that a tidal wave of Obama money would hit a pretty stalled market. We weren't committed to that but we had to check. He wrote to me: "No money for Obama anywhere; I can still lay -300." Well, that was odd.
After all my work was done, I checked in with my father, who's a hard-core leftist and more cynical still. I asked him what he'd thought. "Great speech," he said "but I think it may have gone over everyone's head...way too intellectual for most Americans." I filed that away and put on CNN in time to see Wolf Blitzer filling in for Larry King interviewing various pairs of well-known Clinton and Obama supporters with credentials from either academia, the media or both.
All of Blitzer's guests were pretty much in agreement that Obama had done a great job, though none were gushing particularly and none, surprisingly, including the Travelling-Dyson-Show, noticed any of the more elegant and educational flourishes in the speech such as his linkage of Black rage with that of White rage in Boston during the busing crisis with the White anger in the rust belt during the economic wastage or the White Separatist anger during Waco and Ruby Ridge or the feelings of otherness immigrants and children of immigrant's feel regardless of complexion. The professors also failed to highlight the nimbleness with which Obama could be serious and self-deprecating, e.g., "...is my candidacy about White liberals absolving guilt on the cheap?" or "I 'hope' my imperfect candidacy...." OK, they had their talking points and their own shtick.
Blitzer, though, was on another planet. He was beside himself that Obama did not go further in damning (ha-ha) Jeremiah Wright even further. And was a little peeved with the panels that they were not more critical of Wright. We had felt like Obama could not have handled the basic Wright question more nimbly, with no evasion whatsoever.
The MSM blog punditry seemed to fall a little between where we were and where Blitzer was, i.e., it was sort of "yeah, yeah, great speech, but that's what he does well, but this guy Wright is bad news...." Fox and Limbaugh have been their usual full-out selves throughout. Clinton's lead in PA has increased since the speech and there's this.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080319/pl_nm/usa_politics_poll_dc
Put a gun to my head and I'll guess that any discussion of anything racial and especially anything class-based is just ipso facto bad for Obama. But I'm hardly sure of that. As far as I was concerned, Obama answered every question far better than Nixon as Eisenhower's VP had with the "Checkers" speech, but unlike Nixon not only left no silly things behind to laugh about, Obama also left a speech that ought to be analyzed for its sophistication for decades.
I suppose this means that Clinton will win huge everywhere she's supposed to and that Obama's speech while a long touchdown pass as far as I was concerned was barely a 7-yard pass to the right-flat as far as the MSM and voters are concerned. I guess at some point I will be able to unwind at -180 or so, but I've learned something very valuable about Barack Obama (and Hillary Clinton), the American press and the American public: I DON'T KNOW OR UNDERSTAND ANYTHING. I guess it's because I don't live in America. I can't think of any other reason. I surely couldn't think of a reason that going into the campaign people either "loved" or "hated" Hillary Clinton. I basically thought of her as a very competent senator and a very competitive, precise and tough campaigner.
When I thought Obama was speaking in meaningless platitudes, and pushing a rather retrograde right-wing ideology of concession to Republicans, the press and public coudn't praise him enough. When I thought Obama was truly brilliant, the press and public seemed neutral to negative.
[NB: This as good a time as any to take on some issues of so-called "political correctness." AnitaXanaxNow has said that I'm never "PC". I agree with that assessment more or less. But all sides have version of what's "politically correct." Take Wright, for example. His "crime" was saying "God damn, America." Not only am I not offended by this remark in a fit of pique, I'm also a free-speech absolutist. I also like the term "sacred cow" better than "politically correct," because the latter was a term the left made up to joke about itself. Nevertheless, I do believe in good manners. There's no real good reason for using ethnic slurs unless you have a point to make but I still won't censor them. It's really up to each individual to respond whenever his or her threshold is breached. So, I don't damn those who damn Wright, either. Finally, if I've done anything in support of Obama's speech beyond just praise, I'm going to give myself three bells for analyzing the content of the speech and its rhetorical flourishes rather than using that awful word "articulate." EVERY POLITICIAN IS ARTICULATE. I think that "articulate" is in the waste-can already but if it isn't there are way more accurate, comprehensive and polite ways to describe a Black pol's oratory.]
I invite any and all explanations, though, on why my read on the American public and press is so bad vis-a-vis campaigns.
Kelso's Nuts love you
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5 comments:
As I said in response to your last post ... it come down to the ability (or willingness) of people (media, voters, what have you) to appreciate nuance and subtlety.
As you know this speech touched me deeply. Obama eloquently addressed the ills of our country, that which is often over looked in our History and did so with his head high. He addressed the issue of Rev Wright with dignity, defending the actual culture of the black church which touched me.
I have been so concerned that he was already too marginalized by the party, by his backers and by his desire to be the leader of the free world, but he showed me yesterday that he is a man of integrity and honor and I am honored to consider him a leader.
I don't know that Hillary can speak on that level, or whom she would even address. She continues to shame Hope but she's done nothing but make me and many like me turn away from her message all together.
Great Post Kelso!!
aw folk dont lay dumb. LOL. yo shoot me an email so i can give u my contact info, i see your boy Mccain is campaign in Israel today LOL
Anita: America likes to preach about "standards". An understanding of nuance and subtlety is a "standard," no?
Aunt Jackie: You do you think I felt? On a material level I wanted him to fuck it up, so I could unwind at a favorable price.
Then I hear this speech that not only covers what he needed to cover politically for himself, but also spoke of race AND SOCIAL CLASS in a way I'd never heard before.
Having been marinated in those sorts of politics, I never thought I'd hear it from any American poliician again. A lot of correlation between what Obama accomplished in this speech and what Malcolm X had been speaking about in the year before his assassination and that which Dr. King had been confronting during and leading up to Memphis.
Fingers crossed on this one.
In some senses that Obama's speech has not been recognized for it's depth but merely for it's material political value may make him seem as less of a threat than Malcolm X or Dr. King, in retrospect had been.
I believe that it is very frightening to those at the highest of echelons when a garden-variety politician tries to make the point that the Black American and the White-off-The-Grid-Separatist have more in common than in opposition.
I can't prove this but I believe that Obama himself wrote every word of this while his campaign boilerplate was mostly done by committee as supervised by him.
The whole tenor was just so different. Obama not only unified but he spoke to America from a rather exalted spot but without condescending. He spoke to every American as if every American had been the head of Harvard Law Review.
Of course, Clinton can't do that. That's not what she does. She is one of the better nuts-and-bolts politicians around.
Torrance: You know I'm not playing dumb. I'm ADVERTISING FOR COMMENTS!
McCain in Israel! Don't get me started on that one. Notice how much time he spent in Jerusalem and how little time he spent in Tel-Aviv and Haifa. That ought to tell you how politiics really work in Israel.
I sent you an e-mail
kelso, I may deconstruct Obama's naive sophistrical speech. It's a doozy of moral equivocation, dissembling and temporizing.
Bottom line, with respect to Reverend Wright, he said it's not right to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
On the basis of his offensive logic, we should also agree with that similar statement familiar to many idiots: Yes, but at least Hitler made the trains run on time.
Granted, Wright hasn't orchestrated any extermination efforts. But that's only because he hasn't had the opportunity, as his support for the so-called Palestinians proves.
Taking things a step further, virtually all of Wright's world view comes from his mentor, Louis Farrakhan, famed black separatist and hater of almost everything. Wright apparently edits Farrakhan's rants and bases his own sermons on them.
Obviously Obama loves Wright. Why else would he let that loony racist nut preach to his children every week of their lives? Why would Obama allow such a screwball the chance to shape the thinking and feelings in these impressionable minds.
Was Obama raised to believe that America needed a damning from God? Maybe he was. His mother dragged him around the globe, apparently seeking a better place. However, she didn't find it. And I believe that white grandmother of Obama's, the one who has the same feelings Jesse Jackson has when young black males approach him on the streets at night, I believe she took him into her home while his mother sought a life outside the country in need of God's damning.
So perhaps Obama is right at home when he hears Wright. Maybe those words of damnation are the inspirational words that lift him to his feet every few minutes of the sermon. The Amen words, the Got-That-Right words that give dignity to self-imposed victimization.
Wright is free to rant and rave and soak his followers with all the hate and vitriol his words can pour on them. But this year the impact of his anger will come at a price. His role is a bad one. There are many black ministers who preach self-help and empowerment. But this guy will put the lie to most of it.
He'll be seen at the self-hurt preacher. The anti-white bigot who cost Obama the election. Not that most blacks will agree. They won't. They'll say Obama's landslide loss to McCain was yet another white conspiracy. That Obama's candidacy was a put-up job, an easy knockdown for white America and the America that needs a thorough damning to cleanse itself.
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