A Tale of Two Transcripts (Part 2)

The Jabbering Class

The Privileged Few, they will have their say. Years ago, they ensconced one of their own, Roger Ailes, as the head of Fox News. As everyone knows, Fox News has ever since been the Pravda of the conservative right, their “fair and balanced” being no more fair and balanced than Pravda ever actually represented “truth.”

In the wake of Sen. Obama’s speech, Sean Hannity seized the occasion. He responded to Obama’s challenging speech on race by not at all dealing with race. It also ended on an astonishing note of self-adulation, but I’ll get to that later.

Hannity invited Frank Luntz to dissect the Obama speech. Luntz is a very smart man who bills himself as a pollster, even though the kinds of polls he runs are the ones designed to make people answer questions the way the pollster wants them to. (He himself has said so.) What Luntz really is, is a semantician. He’s a manipulator of language, highly in demand in the Republican party for his ability to make language bend the people to its will. But calling himself a pollster (even though he has been frequently sanctioned by polling organizations) allows him to pretend he is impartial and above the fray. In other words, calling himself a pollster is itself a semantician’s manipulation of language.

The First Absurd Salvo

Luntz’s very first critique of the Obama speech was in itself pretty astonishing:

Well, the first thing is that he read it on the telemprompter and, frankly, he didn’t read it that well. When you are in a situation where you’re being challenged, when your credibility is under attack.... Don’t ever read a teleprompter. Look at them straight in the eye.

Sounds like an interesting left-field critique, but it’s simply an attempt to diminish Obama’s vaunted oratorical skill. (Which scares the bejeebers out of his political opponents.) When one is speaking on a subject as charged as race, where time and again we have seen people make tiny off-the-cuff misstatements that have been seized upon and wrung dry (as Obama himself did with his “typical white woman” remark a couple days later), the last thing on earth you want to do is stand in front of the nation and wing it. (Wouldn’t they have just loved it if he had. Because then, then they’d have had something they could’ve worked with. Some bone they could have gnawed for months.)

Also, it seemed plain to me that Obama deliberately kept his delivery flat in order to stay away from anything that sounded, in a word, preachery. It was necessary for him to draw as a sharp a contrast as he could between his calm, measured oratory and the flights of passion that seized Rev. Wright. We know from Obama’s other speeches that he can wind up a crowd real good, but this wasn’t the time. Luntz deliberately ignores all this in order to make the false claim that Obama’s speech was (a) insincere and (b) dull.

(Of course, insincere and dull is exactly what we get every time our current president reads from the teleprompter, but let’s stick to the subject.)

But Wait, There's More

Mr. Luntz then dares the following, referring to Obama’s comment that Rev. Wright “contains within him the contradictions, the good and the bad of the community that he has served”:

This is not your hairdresser. This is not the guy who does your nails. This is your pastor. This is your rabbi; this is your priest. This is a spiritual leader of a community.

In response to that, one need only say: Jerry Falwell. Pat Robertson. Both of whom claimed, as Rev. Wright did, that America deserved 9/11 for its sins, except that for Falwell and Robertson those sins were liberalism and homosexuality, while for Wright the sin was slavery and racism. Pick your poison.

Luntz and Hannity then engaged in a very poorly-defined critique of this line from Obama: “I can no more disown [Rev. Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother....” Seizing, inevitably, on the word “disown,” they said, essentially, that it was bad without ever actually saying why. Frequent cohost Kristin Powers, a Democratic Party operative, tried to weigh in, without much effect.

LUNTZ: ... Barack Obama is an outstanding communicator.... But I now follow the words that he chooses. And if you watch his speech overall, it is Kennedy-esque. But the moment that you start to look at the language—and I’ve got the text here. That word “disown”...

HANNITY: Yes.

LUNTZ: ... he’s going to pay a price for that in that he brings in his own family and tries to do that.

HANNITY: Because he stays friends when he says he doesn’t disown. He’s still friends with the guy.

POWERS: But wasn’t he talking about the...

LUNTZ: More than just friends.

POWERS: Wasn’t he talking about the complexities of people? That’s the way I heard that.

LUNTZ: You are correct. And he’s trying to explain it. But the problem is when you get to words like “disown,” it’s a rationalization. It’s a defense rather than an explanation.

Is it? Why? After all the clamor for Obama to do exactly that, to disown his pastor, now when he refuses to do so suddenly the word “disown” is really a meaningless rationalization? It’s the semantic version of sour grapes, basically. But of course Luntz doesn’t really explain what he’s trying to say effectively, except for a very vague complaint that Obama equates his grandmother with his pastor. Which was, of course, entirely the point: as Ms. Powers correctly tried to note, Obama was stating that his pastor is imperfect and complex just as his grandmother was, but that he wasn’t about to abandon someone so important in his life just because of some disagreements. (My own great-grandmother, born in Virginia in 1898, once referred to some black children as “pickaninnies.” Should I disown or disavow her?)

This whole thing with Rev. Wright has been a massive attempt to create guilt by association. It is thus disingenuous (at best) to complain when Obama associates his imperfect grandmother with his imperfect pastor.

And by the way, Gary Kamiya has an excellent response to Rev. Wright’s comments in today’s Salon, asserting that “Wright isn’t the problem. Stupid patriotism is the problem.” With which I entirely agree.

Saying Much, Doing Nothing

Luntz then raises a question that seems to deal with the issue, but doesn’t. It has the effect of making him sound high-minded without his having to actually, you know, be high-minded.

Can we have a discussion in this country about race where we don’t have an approach that tries to level accusations? And can we have a discussion that doesn’t say that whites are racist and African-Americans are not? [Obama neither said nor implied any such thing. Plainly.] Are we going to have this kind of open conversation?
And one other point.... There are issues of economy. Our economy is melting down... and yet, Barack Obama is now responding to his pastor....

You’ve gotta love it. Let’s have an open and frank discussion about race, he seems to say, and then he pivots to the economy. And as to that point, Obama delivered another major address the very next day, on the subject of the Iraq war, then dealt with the economy the day after that. So you can’t say that Obama is getting distracted from other issues, since the very next day he turned to other issues. The thing is--nobody paid any attention to these speeches. Race is a red-meat issue, and that’s all anyone wanted to report on. Obama asked whether we were going to allow ourselves to continue to be distracted, and the media then proceeded to try very hard to distract us.

Then, of course, there was the section of the speech where Obama said that the people trying to distract us, The Privileged Few, include “talkshow hosts and political commentators.” No surprise, Luntz found that personally offensive.

Now, look, let’s talk about class warfare, which is what the Democrats have always tried to do against the Republicans. [Because it’s what the Republicans have been actually doing for lo these many years—the upper class successfully dominating every other class. The Democrats take the trouble to point this out, and get accused of attempting to wage class warfare.] ... This is not about Republicans talking about affirmative action or welfare or Democrats or whatever. This is about a religious figure, a very important person in Senator Obama’s life, who has a point of view that is frightening.

Again: Robertson and Falwell. If you’re going to make the guilt-by-association argument, you have to be open to the possibility that your side is just as tainted, if not more so.

Sean Hannity Ventures an Opinion

Mr. Hannity went on to say:

What if Barack Obama, for the entire year that the MoveOn media out there has ignored any scrutiny of him, and they’ve gone along with the bumper sticker of change and the slogans. What if he really deep down in his heart thinks like Pastor Wright? ... I think that would be dangerous. That would mean we would have—if he agreed with Wright, and I don’t know that he does, but if he did, that would mean a racist and an anti-Semite would be president of the United States.

Note how artfully that was phrased (Luntz must have helped on this before the show)--while at the same time appearing to be fair by noting that he has no idea whether Obama actually feels that way, Hannity nonetheless found a way to state forcefully and affirmatively, in solid declarative language, “that would mean a racist and an anti-Semite would be president of the United States.”

Do you feel scared yet? Well why not?! What are you, stupid? A racist and an anti-Semite would be president! You should be terrified of that! Vote Republican!

It went on like that for a while, mixing the “we don’t really know whether he feels that way” language with more fear-mongering, until finally they got weirdly self-congratulatory.

The Grand Finale

Hannity claimed that he was the one who got the Rev. Wright scoop in the first place. Which may be true, I don’t know and I don’t particularly care who scooped whom. But he used this claim to further assert that McCain and Clinton should “stay away from this [issue] and let those of us that have led from the beginning continue to talk about it.”

Yes, it’s true: Sean Hannity, a leading voice for racial dialogue. Bet you didn’t see that one coming, did you?

LUNTZ: And you’ve got the evidence. You’ve got the tape that proves it. Congratulations, Sean.

HANNITY: Thanks. We’ll talk more in the future.

And... commercial break!

I have nothing further to say.

A Tale of Two Transcripts (Part 1)

In Philadelphia

Across the street from Independence Hall on Tuesday morning, there was a moment when, as observers as disparate as David Gergen and Jon Stewart noted, a major American politician spoke to us as if we were adults.

There are two transcripts related to that moment in our American life that I want to deal with. The first is of Senator Obama’s speech, delivered at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia; then I’ll talk about a certain response to it that exemplifies from where the fight is going to come.

The transcript of Obama’s speech is here; there is YouTube video of it here.

Unclean Hands

Let me first start by saying that Senator Obama does not have clean hands on this issue. His campaign has been just as guilty of “playing the race card” as Senator Clinton’s--if not more so. To pick just one example, there was the moment when Senator Clinton said in a speech, “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.” To me, that never read as a denigration of Dr. King’s role in the civil rights movement, it was simply a realistic reading of the often-necessary interplay between visionaries and institutions, and it was also just what she said it was: a recognition of the role that governments can play when they are run well. (Not to say that the Johnson administration was always well run, but let’s not get distracted by that argument.) I’ve said for years now, when small-government activists get all up in my face about how government should keep out of everything except defense and trade, that the Civil Rights Act is a prime example of something that a powerful central government can do beyond the initial scope of its powers--the southern states clearly didn’t want to enact any such legislation, but were forced to by the combined strength of the northern and western states, to everyone’s long-term benefit. Dr. King could not have done it alone, and that’s exactly the point Sen. Clinton was trying to make.

But the Obama campaign took it as an attempt to downplay Dr. King’s importance, which I for one never thought it was, and it bothered me--a lot--that the Obama campaign was willing to go there.

So when I heard that Sen. Obama was going to deliver a “major address” on the subject of race, I did not approach it with the same sort of “Obamatry” that characterizes some of his more ardent supporters--an unquestioning adoration that is in itself a little worrisome. No, I simply wanted to hear what he had to say, hoping against hope that he might just say something valuable.

The Race Problem

Scapegoating of The Other is a problem that has been long with us--for exactly as long as The Many have been exploited by The Powerful Few. Limiting our discussion to the American experience, Howard Zinn has pointed out how white landowners in the southern colonies pitted their black slaves against the local native tribes in order to keep both in line. None of this is new; our current “immigration debate” was sparked by absolutely nothing--except for a desire by those in power to invent an argument by which they could keep themselves in power. There was no actual event that set it in motion, the number of people illegally crossing the border is pretty much the same as it has been for quite a while now, but some bright spark realized that by exploiting fear of The Other, s/he could make plenty of good political hay. And so we continue to fuss and fret over the issue, all the while dancing to the tune of The Powerful Few.

Through it all, at least since the Civil Rights Act (1964), race has been much spoken of, but almost never with any seriousness. Opportunities for minorities slowly grew over time, and as we (by “we” I mean white people such as me, which in its broader sense means those of us who happen to have been born into the “right” club) saw those opportunities expand, we allowed ourselves to believe, without ever really questioning whether it was actually true or not, that the problem was resolved or, at least, resolving.

But all that meant was that we grew fat and self-satisfied, ignoring whatever subterranean currents still remained, hiding away in our desperate little souls. When a Michael Richards came along, a comedian taking outrageousness past the point of comedy, we jumped on that poor man with a word that has become every bit as bad as “pedophile,” calling him “racist” without ever questioning whether maybe we all had some Michael Richards in us.

Actually, that’s probably exactly why we jumped on him so hard--how dare he say what we know we’re not supposed to say! That breaks the code, it brings something into the open that we’d prefer remain buried. And as a result, Michael Richards’s career is destroyed--and we once again manage to avoid having the real discussion about race that we desperately need to have.

But then on Tuesday, Barack Obama stepped up to the podium.

The Speech

Running about forty minutes long and delivered, deliberately, without preacher-like fervor, the speech was clearly a bit of damage control in the wake of comments by Sen. Obama’s longtime, pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But there are lots of ways to approach damage control, and Sen. Obama took the high road, using Rev. Wright’s inflammatory preaching (“God damn America!”) to search for the pain beneath it--and then to reach even higher and seek for the pain that underlies the myriad forms of racism in every American’s soul. He worked just as hard to find the resentments felt by underprivileged whites as he did in elucidating the long history of subjugation and oppression felt by blacks in America.

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 handed them anything. They built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pensions dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and they feel their dreams slipping away. And in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.

Perhaps Obama is uniquely qualified to make such a speech, coming from a racially-mixed background that makes him both black and white, with relatives, as he noted, spread across three continents. (Lord knows George Bush could never have given a speech such as this--setting aside the question of whether he’s even capable of it, he simply wouldn’t be credible.)

The whole purpose of the speech was to take the broader view. Rev. Wright said some reprehensible things, but Obama also told of the man he’s known for more than twenty years...

As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children.... He contains within him the contradictions--the good and the bad--of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

Which of course reminds me of that greatest of American poets, Walt Whitman, who gloried in the rich complexities of life, and who of course said “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).” Whitman understood this over a century ago; Obama understands it now. But The Powerful Few need us to wallow in false certainty; they peddle a Manichaean, black-and-white (literally) worldview in which a “wrong” word automatically equates to a wrong person, in which no one is allowed to be complex but must be perfectly simple--or else immediately and categorically denied. Often these Powerful Few are professed Christians, but they have of course entirely forgotten--willfully forgotten--Christ’s warning: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”

Or, as Obama put it himself:

Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze--a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.

(Within minutes of this you heard conservative pundits proclaiming how offended they were that Obama had “stooped” to the political in this passage. The Powerful Few will do what they must to protect their privileges--but that’s for the next installment of this little essay.)

Obama’s best passage is also his most insightful:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress had been made; as if this country--a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black, Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old--is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen--is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope--the audacity to hope--for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

It is here that his endlessly-repeated leitmotif of change shifts its shape, metamorphosing from a political slogan to something like a real ideology--a vision of an America that is never static, that, as Obama said in his speech, “...may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.” America represents an ongoing evolution in the idea of human rights, a constant expansion from the limited sense that Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote “all men are created equal,” an expansion that continues today with all its attendant strains--Jefferson surely never imagined that transgendered individuals would one day seek their equal rights, but once that door of equality was opened, it was inevitable that one day everyone, absolutely everyone, would insist on passing through. The process is never easy, but it becomes impossible if we look at the nation as something static and constant and cold, something that does not evolve or change.

Obama himself is the change he seeks; and if there’s any justice at all in the world, the challenge he posed on Tuesday--implicitly asking us, by treating us as adults, whether or not we will in fact act like adults--will end with him in the White House. Where my most fervent hope is that he will continue to lead through challenge for the next many years, exactly as he did this week.

Now that, that would be the kind of president I’ve been waiting my whole life for.

Next time... the Powerful Few jabber back.

Oh, Shut Up

A recent story in USA Today reported on an Associated Press/Ipsos poll that found, not so surprisingly, that Americans don't read much. The most widely quoted statistic was that one person in four read no books at all last year. This was widely noted when the story came out, and much lamented. But that's not what I want to talk about.

No, there was a companion story that I found more interesting, though not in a good way. In it, former Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, who is now president of the American Association of Publishers, was asked about a statistic from the study that seems to show liberals read more than conservatives. What she said was, basically, idiotic:

"The Karl Roves of the world have built a generation that just wants a couple slogans: 'No, don't raise my taxes, no new taxes.'... It's pretty hard to write a book saying, 'No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes' on every page."... She said liberals tend to be policy wonks who "can't say anything in less than paragraphs. We really want the whole picture, want to peel the onion."

Now see, it seems to me that if books are imperiled, the president of an association that seeks to promote books probably shouldn't go around insulting any potential readers. Because that is of course the only thing she accomplished: she insulted the intelligence of anyone who has ever thought of himself or herself as a conservative. (The late William F. Buckley, to pick only one example, was in no way a man who limited himself to sloganeering.)

Her quote is on its face utter nonsense, and it's no surprise that it drew an immediate, equally idiotic, response from the other side of the ideological divide.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Schroeder was "confusing volume with quality" with her remarks. "Obfuscation usually requires a lot more words than if you simply focus on fundamental principles, so I'm not at all surprised by the loquaciousness of liberals," he said.

Nice use of big words in a quote insulting people who use big words, but that's where the fun stops.

What it all demonstrates is that the culture wars rage on because too many people just can't let go. Ms. Schroeder can't stop being a Democratic Congresswoman, even though she hasn't actually been one for eleven years. She is still attached to her old "glory" days, and in the process is doing a major disservice to the very institution she's supposed to be promoting in the here and now. Conservative Mary Matalin said it correctly in the same article: "As head of a book publishing association, she probably shouldn't malign any readers."

No, Ms. Schroeder damn well shouldn't. The fact that people aren't reading is serious stuff, and she damn well ought to know better than to make things worse by pretending to be what she isn't anymore. Let's please drop the partisan bullshit and focus on what really matters, shall we?