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- September 30, 2009: Good Sound from a Strange Mountain
- May 20, 2009: Zapping up the Ulti Lingo*
- February 16, 2009: Seeing the Light
- December 30, 2008: Fly Past
- September 18, 2008: How We Think Today
- August 20, 2008: Telling Truths in America
- June 25, 2008: Follow the Many
- June 6, 2008: Planesong
- April 26, 2008: Praising Famous Men
- April 1, 2008: The Unbearable Rightness of Being Happy
Telling Truths in America
Today’s NYT has an in-depth examination of Barack Obama’s tax philosophy and proposals. While interesting in and of itself, the article is especially useful in showing how the candidate thinks… in fact, in showing the candidate’s startlingly live intellect. A mind in a national-level politician is a strangely exotic notion, given George W Bush’s depressing inarticulation and John McCain’s distressing tic of seeming like he’s reading a teleprompter even when he isn’t.
Towards the end of the article, Obama quotes from Robert Kennedy’s “Soul of America” speech from the ‘68 campaign. Delivered less than three month before his assassination, the speech has the trademark Kennedy humor, a characteristic appreciation of history, and most of all, a richly poetic vein doomed to lie fallow in American politics until Senator Obama’s emergence at the 2004 Democratic convention.
Obama picks one of his “favorite quotes” from the following wonderful riff on the limitations of Economics:
[the] Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
That is, indeed, a clever juxtaposition. It’s not difficult to see why Obama, RFK’s stylistic descendant, highlights the section. However lyrical though, it is far from the rhetorical gut of the speech. That is RFK’s truth-telling of the country’s two major challenges - Vietnam and its attendant unrest and alienation, and domestic poverty:
…we as a people, we as a people, are strong enough, we are brave enough to be told the truth of where we stand. This country needs honesty and candor in its political life and from the President of the United States. But I don’t want to run for the presidency - I don’t want America to make the critical choice of direction and leadership this year without confronting that truth. I don’t want to win support of votes by hiding the American condition in false hopes or illusions. I want us to find out the promise of the future, what we can accomplish here in the United States, what this country does stand for and what is expected of us in the years ahead. And I also want us to know and examine where we’ve gone wrong. And I want all of us, young and old, to have a chance to build a better country and change the direction of the United States of America.
RFK spends the rest of his speech - some 2800 words - describing Appalachian poverty, the mess in Vietnam and laying out the hard work ahead.
Critiquing the recent Rick Warren theofest starring the two major party candidates, my wife observed that Obama “dumbed down” his delivery for the (largely right-leaning) evangelicals, that Obama soft-pedaled to avoid antagonizing the (largely white) audience. Her comments reminded me of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ similar complaint about Senator Obama’s timidity:
Obama can’t bring the same moralism to bear on the wider he country which he applies to the black community, that he can’t point out to Americans that oil prices going up is a good thing. Polluting the world your children will inherit is a moral issue. A system that allows people to buy homes with no money down is a moral issue. Telling people that the best thing they can do after the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, is go out an shop is a moral issue.I hear all of this talk about Obama as a post-racial candidate–but that only applies when its time for white people to pat themselves on the back. A truly post-racial candidate would be free to preach morals not just to African-Americans, but to all Americans.
The parallels between RFK’s and Obama’s respective situations are remarkable: Vietnam vs. Iraq, widespread poverty vs. the current economic meltdown. Perhaps Obama should hew less to advisors-generated tactics and focus more on speaking his mind a la RFK. Maybe “the real Obama” is more like RFK than Hillary Clinton.