The Idea Blog

I won’t use this space to endorse or even promote a candidate, but in Barack Obama’s speech yesterday, his genealogy assertion at about the four-minute mark was compelling proof that there are issues like the economy, the war, healthcare and energy - yes, these are all critical and we need to work our way over, through and around them. But then there are other, even more macro issues, and how we acknowledge and work through them gives us the strength and experience to do what we have to do.

“I’m the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas….I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America, and I’ve lived in some of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries in her the blood of slaves and slaveowners, an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. 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.”

It’s easy to dismiss the “big speech” as political stunt. It’s also easy to get caught up in effective oratory. I don’t think Obama’s speech yesterday on “Race in America” was either of those, neither stunt or mere oratory. Here’s the full text. And the link above in the first paragraph is the full speech in video.

UPDATE (March 22, 2008): Add Peggy Noonan’s op-ed in the WSJ to your reading list about “the speech.” She’s right on when she says this:

“He spoke in full and longish paragraphs that didn’t summon applause. This left TV producers having to use longer-than-usual soundbites in order to capture his meaning. And so the cuts of the speech you heard on the news were more substantial and interesting than usual, which made the coverage of the speech better. People who didn’t hear it but only saw parts on the news got a real sense of what he’d said.

“If Hillary or John McCain said something interesting, they’d get more than an eight-second cut too. But it works only if you don’t write an applause-line speech. It works only if you write a thinking speech.

“They should try it.”