The International House of Bacon

* In terms of having a speech that he had to make, I generally think he pulled it off. I haven’t seen the speech, only read it, so I’d imagine Obama’s general delivery helped things considerably. It’s not a perfect speech, and I don’t consider it any more inspiring or amazing or anything like that than any of his other speeches, but it’s really a good speech overall, and I don’t feel the need to hesitate much in saying it.

* Problem elements: it turns out that he was lying about whether he witnessed the statements first hand, which could bite him in the rear end if played properly. Rather than sticking to a universality theme, he made some hits on Ferraro and “[T]alk show hosts and conservative commentators” that I thought were more than a little inappropriate, but will likely be glossed over in the long run. The campaigning toward the end wasn’t really useful - if you’re trying to convince people that you’re not a crazy racist crank like your pastor, health care and jobs aren’t really on people’s minds. The final anecdote about Ashley felt really out of place for me, especially how it ended. I couldn’t figure out the point, except that maybe he’s trying to demonstrate how a young white girl who supports a black Presidential candidate who lives post-civil rights legislation was able to convince an elderly black man to come on board? I dunno, but it didn’t work for me.

* If racial exclusion is one of the problems, did this speech work on an inclusionary basis? Thankfully, he didn’t get too preachy about it (my number one fear going in), but the segment about Trinity, where the “services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear…” was a bit odd. I know what the point was - it was a teachable moment for Obama, and shedding some light may have been beneficiary, but it does come across as a little condescending. We’ve all seen movies, we know that the black church is not all full of stand-sit-stand-sit-kneel-stand-sit reverent obedience to the pastor, but more of a larger experience. I remember being personally jealous of that in grade school and high school. But that was never the problem, either - the energy and enthusiasm of the congregation during their time in church was never at issue as much as the energy and enthusiasm for Wright’s comments. Obama seems to recognize that to a point, but, in trying to help the majority understand what the minority experiences, he fails to understand exactly what it is about the minority experiences in this episode that makes the majority at best uncomfortable and at worst outraged.

Toward the end, he gets very empathetic about the entire thing: “a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch.” I’ll forgive him the “white privilege” meme and drill down to the broader problem - on one hand, he says “Yeah, I get it - there’s some anger on the majority side, too, and I think it can be justified,” but then turns around with how he feels those issues “affected the political landscape.” By attaching the views of the minority - in this case, those who disliked things like welfare or affirmative action because of the benefits to minorities - to those of the majority - who often had policy-based (welfare is not a good use of taxpayer money, it has questionable results) or equality-based (affirmative action fights inequality with inequality) views - it turns the entire statement into one that’s only better than Wright’s in terms of tone. I’m positive that it was an inadvertent action, without a doubt, but to spend any number of minutes on a speech trying to explain the minority position only to then try and make a different, more disturbing, minority position larger than it is may end up negating the broader message in some circles.

* Overall, though, I was surprisingly impressed. He could have gone an entirely different direction, and largely didn’t. He refrained from throwing Wright under the bus, which is fairly noble in a way even if I think he’d be better off cutting ties. He didn’t prey on some of the more negative and unfair criticisms that have been levied to this point, and he could have. He largely kept the entire speech positive and on-topic, which is hard to do when talking race these days. While I can obviously go on and on about the parts I don’t agree with, the simple fact remains that I think he pulled off the speech he had to pull off, and there’s no faulting him in that, IMO. My only hope at this point is that the bleeding kind of stops a bit - it’s apparent that he’s addressed this comptently, so let’s move back to the point that we can’t afford his agenda or something.