STUMPED
Barack Star
by David Kusnet
TNR Online
Post date: 06.20.05
What happens when a prominent political figure who's usually a media star gives a great speech that doesn't get much news coverage? If the pol and the staff are smart, they'll keep using the frame and the phrasings until the news media, political insiders, and, eventually, a national audience start paying attention--and the speech that once was ignored becomes the politician's trademark. That, at any rate, is what happened to Ronald Reagan's case for conservatism, Mario Cuomo's tribute to "the family of America," and John Edwards's populist stump speech.
Much the same fate may await the commencement address Barack Obama delivered at Knox College on June 4. The speech got little coverage outside local papers and has been largely ignored by columnists and talking heads. Perhaps that's because few national journalists or even Chicago-based reporters are inclined to visit Galesburg, Illinois, on a Saturday; or maybe because Obama's speech didn't make news in the conventional sense--it contained no attacks on his adversaries, no announcements of new policy proposals, no slurs on entire segments of society.
All Obama did was make the best case for liberal politics in recent memory, with a panoramic view of American history that made public investment in job training and new technologies sound like the logical descendents of the Civil Rights movement, the New Deal, the Progressive Era, the abolitionists, and the American Revolution.
Unlike most contemporary liberal orators, Obama avoided a numbing list of the government programs he supports, grim indictments of the social injustices he lamented, or cumbersome quotations from the heroes he invoked. Instead, he emphasized two ideas that Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Martin Luther King used but that today's liberals have foolishly ceded to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush: individual responsibility and American exceptionalism. Both themes are well-suited to graduation speeches, and Obama employed them masterfully.
In the first of two sentences that he repeated throughout his speech, Obama asked the graduates, "What will be your place in history?" He introduced this point with an endearingly self-deprecating anecdote about a reporter who asked him that question shortly after he was sworn in as a freshman senator--one who ranked ninety-ninth in seniority and was assigned "a tiny transition office ... next to the janitor's closet in the basement of the Dirksen Office Building."
But Obama soon made clear that his reference to one's "place in history" was meant to raise several serious points about his audience, their generation, and our nation. In his first venture into American exceptionalism, Obama explained that the United States is unique because individuals can determine their own destinies. "[T]he question of our place in history," he said, "is not answered for us, it's answered by us."
Then, turning from individuals to the nation, Obama offered a second reason why America is decent and distinctive: "We're able to recognize our failings and then rise to meet the challenges of our time." Returning to his original point, he explained that each generation finds its "place in history" by confronting the problems of its era. Telling the stories of how successive American generations abolished slavery, addressed the injustices of the industrial age, defeated economic depression, and fought fascism, Obama repeated his second litany: "We chose to act, and we rose together."
Told this way, American history is an inspiring account of challenges confronted and conquered. Accepting injustices isn't merely immoral; it is passive, cowardly, and un-American--or, as Obama put it more felicitously, "This is not us." Using Reaganesque rhetoric, Obama declared that failing to take action against today's social and economic problems is "not how our story ends" because "America is a land of big dreamers and big hopes."
The difference between Reagan and Obama, of course, is that the Gipper, like George W. Bush today, found heroism only in individual endeavors or in war, not in collective action to solve social problems here at home. By attributing heroic dimensions to the taming of the robber barons, the founding of the public school system, and the organizing of the labor movement, Obama makes progressivism patriotic--and a worthy way for ambitious individuals to find their "place in history."
Still another remarkable point about Obama's speech is that it focused mostly on working Americans without patronizing them as victims or publicly wondering why they vote Republican. Instead, he spoke straightforwardly of "the fact that when you drive by the old Maytag plant around lunchtime, no one walks out anymore." And, gently, he warned the graduates that countries like India and China are producing a new generation of "skilled educated workers" who will be competing with their American counterparts, not just the guys who get laid off from factory jobs.
Presenting what few progressives bother to offer nowadays--a view of the global economy that is neither Pollyanna-ish nor protectionist and a vision of America's future that includes good-paying blue-collar as well as white-collar jobs--Obama called for more job training and retraining and also government investments in new technologies that could give our businesses and workers a competitive advantage. "Just imagine what it could do for a town like Galesburg," he said. "Ten or twenty years down the road that old Maytag plant could reopen its doors as an ethanol refinery that turned corn into fuel. Down the street a biotechnology research lab could open up on the cusp of discovering a cure for cancer."
Just as impressive as what Obama said is what he didn't say. There were no references to his inspiring life story, few indictments of injustices against those he described as "men and women who looked like me," and little else that would make a middle-class, white, or conservative listener tune him out.
Obama's staffers seem to understand how effective such rhetoric can be: They've been emailing the transcript around, and it has been cited by several liberal blogs. Quite likely, Obama will keep using this rhetoric until the press, the political community, and the public pay attention. Here's hoping that Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, and everyone else who's trying to make the case for progressive politics are paying attention, too.
