I personally thought the "inflammatory" remark Wright made actually had hit the mark. I was surely expecting bullshit, condemnation, lies, "post-partisan, post-racial" horseshit as has characterized his entire campaign to date.
This was hard-nosed truth, eloquently and fearlessly expressed. He hit me where I lived. He talked social class. He expressed the roots of Black anger, White anger and immigrant anger. He talked for the first time like a DEMOCRAT.
I'll be adding on to this as time goes on but some highlights come to mind
- "alleviating guilt on the cheap"
- "did you agree with everything your pastor...said?"
- "I am not so arrogant as to believe that we can get beyond racial wounds with my own imperfect candidacy"
Wow. He slammed right-wing talk radio and their bullshit claims of "political correctness." I really can't write enough about this. But fuck it, I'll try...
Perhaps, the most masterful moment of the speech was the tying together of the ousider's rage common to all: Blacks, working-class Whites, White Separatists, and immigrants. It really was close to late-life Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And that Obama was able to do it WHILE shucking off his comfortable rhetorical gear and doing it without a hint of grandiloquence was mind-bending. In case anyone new is reading this, please consider the source. Your Uncle Kelso has been one of the biggest Obama skeptics on the blogosphere.
I'll always be a cynic and I know this is a slick sonofabitch who refused three times to let Mayor Gavin Newsome have his picture taken with him when Newsome was donating money to Obama and only because Newsome had just signed a municipal gay-marriage bill into law. Three times Newsome asked, for his kids, no less. Three times Obama turned him down. This is the same sonofabitch who tried to make me feel ashamed for being a liberal, for being a Democrat, for NOT WORSHIPPING A MIGHTY GAWD.
But as I've written recently that Obama's a good politician and getting better. He has gotten great. Sure, I wish he'd hit the books some more and give up the "themes."
Sure, the last third of the speech was campaign boilerplate boring and full of bathos, but fuck it if this guy didn't come back and hit hard with a non race-based class issue.
Sardines on toast and menengitis for me. I just wish I didn't know that he's a shill like all the rest because I loved this speech.
Look, I believe in smiling when I win and paying when I lose and always admitting it when I'm wrong. Obama's speech is not by a long-shot the 13th chime on the clock that makes everything negative I've ever written about him wrong. I stand by every word I've ever written. And I don't think he alone can solve the USA-SSR's economic woes with another speech. But, I'm sorry, this was a very different Barack Obama today. This was finally, I can only hope, the real Barack Obama. I understand that his campaign is about words not plans but he couldn't have spoken better ones than what he laid down in Philadelphia today. In some ways, Obama's speech was great for it's paradoxical subtlety and iconoclasm. Just a treat is all.
I cannot imagine a speech more different than the lame one he gave at the 2004 convention. A brief perusal of the internets reveals that the MSM is much less impressed with this one than they should be. This was quite something. If he can keep going on in this vein and add some more detail to his game, and stays the dovish course, he might be a special one. Christ, he is already just for having said what he did and how he did.
Oh, yeah, you can draw the inference from my remarks two posts back that if Obama get this right he could be one of the great presidents. I stand by that, too. He's short on his economics and foreign policy but if this speech has told me anything it's that Obama is one hell of a quick study.
Im-pre-sion-ante!
Kelso's Nuts love you
11 comments:
kelso
off subject
a bit of financial humor
http://docs.google.com/TeamPresent?docid=ddp4zq7n_0cdjsr4fn&skipauth=true&pli=1
D-CAPny:
That's great! Probably every finance professor the world is using it now.
I didn't realize that the problems at BearStearns arose from the prop desk being on the wrong side of a lot of this with small haircuts.
I had assumed that since so much of their business was involved in clearing f/x derivatives that they had either gotten jammed-up with a couple of failed counter-parties or had their books out of balance and were very long a bad side.
I've really been too busy to read a lot about it and I like to get the whole story.
Later.
Well said, I didn't watch the whole speech, but like you think if he pulled this together so quickly, it's an indication of how well he can think on his feet - and under pressure.
I was a little nervous about him doing it, but it was necessary and I think (hope) it will help settle the storm a bit.
info@myafricandisapora.com
I think the problem with both the MSM and the blogosphere is that NUANCE is verboten. The big headline, the outrageous statement, the slip-up, what have you, are the things they are looking for. Serious discussions of complex issues, be they about race or the economy or what is is really going to take to transition out of the mess in Iraq are over the heads of most "commentators" and "pundits" ... and the reason for that is, in some parts, is a growing cynicism on the part of the media toward the viewing/reading public.
And I agree with you, Kelso, that some of the things the Reverand Wright had to say were on point. Particularly the 9/11 remark about the chickens (or whatever) coming home to roost. Bill Maher got kicked off TV for awhile for implying the same thing. How dare, how DARE anyone imply that the messes we are in as a country are of our own making?
BB,AXN:
More to follow on both your comments in my next post.
EXQUISITELY BLACK:
My email to you on that other subject got bounced back to me. That's comforting!
I'll try again.
I still think Wright's words may have killed Obama's chances.
Wingnuts in the South were foaming at the mouth waiting to dust off their crosses, and cans of gasoline.
FAIRLANE: My business partner agrees with you. As his task is to watch a lot of FOX while I have the boring but slightly less infuriating CNN beat, he's seen the tapeloop of Wright and is convinced that despite Obama's giving an A+ speech, he's actually been damaged. Less as against Clinton but as against McCain.
FAIRLANE: UPDATE...how weird is this DemNom race? Obama gives a near-perfect speech and all that's happened since is huge gains by Clinton and lots of money for her...I'll be able to get out of this with a small profit laying Obama back at -180 or smaller. Go figure.
Yeah, it's 5AM over here and I need some sleep, but I'm coming back to visit. You saw what I saw. Thank the fucking Lord cuz I was beginning to think I was crazy...
Post a Comment