Burnt Orange Report

We told ya so...

By Byron LaMasters

Well, finally, the rest of the country (well, at least those who watched) figured out what all the comotion about Obama in the blogosphere was all about. I was cheering Obama on since March. And I've been thrilled with him ever since (here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

Obama just brings it all. He has an inspiring personal story. He frames a progressive message in a conservative manner by speaking about personal responsibility, a unified America and opportunity through hard work. One thing that I'm struck by is that conservative columnists are praising the speech - a speech that brought the mostly left-leaning Democrats in the convention hall into a frenzy. Why?

I think that Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher captures conservative reaction to the speech well:

One more thought about Barack Obama: almost always when I hear African-American politicians, I feel like they're speaking to their own, excluding my kind of voter. Tonight I felt like Barack Obama was speaking to me, to the mainstream, to everybody.

Consider this line from Jesse Jackson's landmark 1984 Democratic Convention speech:

My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised.

That's a great fragment of rhetoric, but I'm a middle-class white socially conservative male who is, therefore, the Bad Guy. So, tonight, 20 years later, along comes another black Democrat from Chicago, and he gives a magnificent mainstream speech that makes me think that this guy is onto something, that he would at least listen to somebody like me. I probably wouldn't vote for Obama because I'm sure I don't agree with his policies. But I'd sure hear him out, because I don't perceive that he thinks of people like me as villains. That's progress for the Democratic Party.

Obama won't win the votes of people like Rod. But he has won the votes of not only the Chicago Black community and the White liberals that supported Jesse Jackson. Obama beat a terrific field of candidates in places that normally don't vote for progressive African-American politicians - the collar suburban counties of Chicago. Last night, he proved exactly why.

Obama is the type of African-American politician that White progressives like myself have always dreamed of. It's an outrage that the United States Senate has no African-Americans currently. It's easy to blame conservative voters as racist for opposing African-Americans for the body, be in Ron Kirk in Texas, Carol Mosely Braun in Illinois, or by scaring off qualified African-Americans from running statewide like Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee. But Obama is different from all of those above. While Kirk was able to form a multiracial coalition in Dallas, he failed to do so statewide.

Obama is the rare African-American candidate that speaks in a langauge that appeals to the Black community and progressive Whites, but also to working class, middle class, White, moderate to independent to conservative voters. Jesse Jackson is a brilliant orator, but he is clearly rooted in the African-American community, and the first description that would come to most Whites would probably be something along the lines of "African-American activist". That's fine with me, but it's difficult for many middle-class Whites to related to his perspective. Obama, on the other hand frames his story as an American story, as the son of an immigrant who worked his way through school without question of how he got into Harvard Law School (as the chair of the Harvard Law Review). It is my hope that more African-American politicians will adopt Obama's rhetoric. It's not necessary to abandon progressive ideals to build a strong multiracial coalition (some would argue that Ron Kirk did that in 2002), but it is necessary to articulate those values in langauge that appeals to all voters.

Full text of Obama's remarks are here.

Posted by Byron LaMasters at July 28, 2004 10:47 AM | TrackBack