Barack Obama wrote his speech on race in America himself. He worked on it for a couple of days, and stayed up until 2 a.m. Tuesday to finish it. The senator conceded on “Nightline” that he couldn’t predict how the address would be perceived: “You know, you throw a rock into a pond and those ripples will go out. We don’t know where those ripples will go. I have no idea how this plays out politically.”
It’s always the awkward catch, isn’t it? How a political event “plays” ultimately dictates whether it was a good move or a bad one. Time’s Joe Klein described Obama’s remarks as “the best speech about race I’ve ever heard delivered by an American politician,” but immediately wondered whether the media would be judicious in its coverage. “I hope our colleagues over at the networks give Obama his due,” Klein said.
Right off the bat, shortly after the speech ended, it looked like the media was going to blow it. The lead headline on MSNBC’s website read, “Obama: Racial anger is ‘real.'” On CNN.com, it read, “Obama: Constitution stained by ‘sin of slavery.'” Shortly thereafter, Fox News ran an edited soundbite to make it appear as if Obama was attacking his grandmother.
I’m pleased to note, however, that news outlets got more responsible as the day went on. The NYT ran a news-analysis piece this morning that seemed to appreciate the significance of the event.
It was an extraordinary moment — the first black candidate with a good chance at becoming a presidential nominee, in a country in which racial distrust runs deep and often unspoken, embarking at a critical juncture in his campaign upon what may be the most significant public discussion of race in decades.
In a speech whose frankness about race many historians said could be likened only to speeches by Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, Senator Barack Obama, speaking across the street from where the Constitution was written, traced the country’s race problem back to not simply the country’s “original sin of slavery” but the protections for it embedded in the Constitution.
Yet the speech was also hopeful, patriotic, quintessentially American — delivered against a blue backdrop and a phalanx of stars and stripes. Mr. Obama invoked the fundamental values of equality of opportunity, fairness, social justice. He confronted race head-on, then reached beyond it to talk sympathetically about the experiences of the white working class and the plight of workers stripped of jobs and pensions.
That’s a good start.
It looks like the editorial boards got it right, too.
NYT: “We can’t know how effective Mr. Obama’s words will be with those who will not draw the distinctions between faith and politics that he drew, or who will reject his frank talk about race. What is evident, though, is that he not only cleared the air over a particular controversy — he raised the discussion to a higher plane.”
WaPo: “Obama’s mission in Philadelphia yesterday was to put the controversy over inflammatory statements made by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., his spiritual mentor and pastor for 20 years, behind him. But Mr. Obama (D-Ill.) went deeper than that. He used his address as a teachable moment, one in which he addressed the pain, anger and frustration of generations of blacks and whites head-on — and offered a vision of how those experiences could be surmounted, if not forgotten. It was a compelling answer both to the challenge presented by his pastor’s comments and to the growing role of race in the presidential campaign.”
LAT: “No single speech will recalibrate America’s consideration of race and politics, but we are closer today, thanks to this remarkable address, to facing our history and perfecting our nation.”
This is encouraging, of course, but most people don’t get their news from newspapers, they get it from TV. Has anyone been watching? I’m curious to know whether the networks were fair, complimentary, etc.