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Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Obama’s Reagan moment
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Well, they muddle on. Hillary Clinton takes Indiana, 51-49, while Barack Obama wins North Carolina, 56-42. Neither is likely now to win at the ballot box the delegates needed. The game shifts to the superdelegates — which means that the party elite anoints the winner. Democrats have a mess on their hands.
Obama showed in his post-victory speech in North Carolina that, while he now appears to be the weaker of the two Democrats in a general election campaign against John McCain, he’ll be tough to beat.
As he stood before the cameras last night, the screen behind him was filled with the faces of people who represent Hillary voters. All were white, most all were women and many of them were older.
And while he didn’t mention Jeremiah Wright, he took the second step in distancing himself from Wright’s jaundiced view of America. I quote a portion of his remarks at length here because they could have been delivered by Ronald Reagan. The view is optimistic and distinctly different from the America where institutions are evil and embittered small-town people live clinging in their grimness to God, guns and bigotry.
From Obama’s speech:
“The people I’ve met in small towns and big cities across this country understand that government can’t solve all our problems - and we don’t expect it to. We believe in hard work. We believe in personal responsibility and self-reliance.
“But we also believe that we have a larger responsibility to one another as Americans - that America is a place - that America is the place - where you can make it if you try. That no matter how much money you start with or where you come from or who your parents are, opportunity is yours if you’re willing to reach for it and work for it. It’s the idea that while there are few guarantees in life, you should be able to count on a job that pays the bills; health care for when you need it; a pension for when you retire; an education for your children that will allow them to fulfill their God-given potential. That’s the America we believe in. That’s the America I know.
“This is the country that gave my grandfather a chance to go to college on the GI Bill when he came home from World War II; a country that gave him and my grandmother the chance to buy their first home with a loan from the government.
“This is the country that made it possible for my mother - a single parent who had to go on food stamps at one point - to send my sister and me to the best schools in the country on scholarships.
“This is the country that allowed my father-in-law - a city worker at a South Side water filtration plant - to provide for his wife and two children on a single salary. This is a man who was diagnosed at age thirty with multiple sclerosis - who relied on a walker to get himself to work. And yet, every day he went, and he labored, and he sent my wife and her brother to one of the best colleges in the nation. It was a job that didn’t just give him a paycheck, but a sense of dignity and self-worth. It was an America that didn’t just reward wealth, but the work and the workers who created it.
“Somewhere along the way, between all the bickering and the influence-peddling and the game-playing of the last few decades, Washington and Wall Street have lost touch with these values.”
That’s a great transition — assuming he repeats it often enough — from Wright’s toxic anti-Americanism and perhaps even from the question of why he sat there for 20 years without walking away, as Oprah had done.
Questions are likely to remain about his judgment. But nobody can question his ability to deliver precisely the right speech at the appropriate time. It’ll be no walk-over for McCain.
