Another Voice
Wednesday, 26th March 2008
Reading the speeches of McCain and Obama has made me ashamed of our political class and its craven soundbites
Today I have repeated the experiment. I’ve just read an entire speech by Barack Obama: the Illinois Senator’s recent speech in Philadelphia about race.
In many ways this speech could hardly be more different from Senator McCain’s. Obama’s text is crisp, modern, elegant, moving and stylish. It is also lucid — at times almost painfully so — and very much conceived as an exercise in communication. The speech has been drafted with its audience in mind at every turn, speaking clearly and carefully to the listener, anxious to keep us on board, and to keep our sympathy too.
But, however different, this speech, like McCain’s, comes from the heart and the mind of the man who wrote it. It is his speech, and every word suggests he cares how he expresses himself and respects language. And, like McCain’s, the speech has the confidence never to swagger or stoop; and the courage and intelligence to see and confess that the world, and America, is a complicated and ambivalent thing, and the easy answers often wrong.
Senator Obama’s speech in Philadelphia is nearly 5,000 words long and should really be read in full and at a sitting, for its argument is sequential, gathering force as the text proceeds. You will find it easily on the internet. I shall restrict myself here to quoting his remarks about his church. Obama’s campaign has been embarrassed, and his enemies handed ammunition, by this African–American church, and its retired black pastor’s strident comments about race. The easy thing would have been to dissociate himself in simple terms from all three. Instead, he says this:
The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.
And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptised my children...
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Ian C
March 28th, 2008 11:26am Report this commentThese men are running for Head of State (and the world) whereas our political leaders have to play second fiddle to the media and when in power are unchecked by Parliament or a Supreme Court, if they have any sort of a parliamentary majority which by definition they have. We need the checks and balances that the American Constitution brings (and that does not mean the poor relation that would be proportional represenatation) so we can get our politicians more closely accountable for their actions. If we can do this without the money and time spent on elections in the USA we would really improve our governance and sense of purpsoe as a nation.
Alf C
March 28th, 2008 12:35pm Report this commentUsually, in the discussion of race in America, it is all about "Black" and "White". In his Philadelphia speech, Senator Obama introduced immigration into the equation, and thus the question of assimilation. As the son of an immigrant, he surely realizes that being multicultural is a transient status and that Affirmative Action is only a temporary accomodation on the road to full assimilation. Mainstreaming can be the only goal.
Ian C, I had the impression that Parliament was more responsive, even though in the US, citizens may have "recall", and "referendum" by which to exert influence in their state or in the Congress.
Rosemary Fitzgerald
March 28th, 2008 5:12pm Report this commentIn his 1989 memoir, 'Wordstruck', the Canadian broadcaster and author Robert MacNeil wrote about the way "public men" use words. I read them for the first time this month and can't stop thinking about them with respect to the US election in particular, and politicians everywhere. I think they make an excellent footnote to this article:
"We are adrift today in a sea of weightless words. . . . The public words of public men seem to be used increasingly like aerosol room fresheners, to make nice smells. The President of the United States routinely uttered words he did not think through, words that he had not searched his thoughts to find; just a package of words on a file card. Occasionally he read the wrong set and laughed it off.
"The U.S. was founded on words that weighed heavily, words that carried the deepest convictions of thoughtful, daring men. Would you believe a politician today who said he pledged his life and sacred honour? Or have those words just come to be a way of sounding sincere? . . . Politics, the law, advertising, religion become the art of employing words to cover for the moment, to get you off the hook, to win a verdict, pass a test, fill a space, get rid of a question."
Terry James
March 28th, 2008 6:28pm Report this commentAs a Canadian I always respected the speeches Tony Blair delivered. They were well written and I believe that most of them he wrote on his own, unlike George Bush, who I think relies heavily on speech writers.
Terry James
Vegreville, Alberta, Canada
Paula Wagstaff
March 29th, 2008 12:37am Report this commentMatthew, a simple reply.
Thank you for your article and your observance.
Believe me, it is even more frustrating in New Zealand.
In fact a total kindergarten.
Serge Isaac Barou
March 30th, 2008 6:48am Report this commentIn an article on speech and use of words, Mr. Parris' own performance is less then satisfactory.
He calls Rev. Wright's assertion that HIV is the government's invention purposed to eradicate the black community, “a strident comment about race”. Is it really?
Citing Senator Obama's description of his own Grandmother as “a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street”, Mr. Parris obviously is not aware that the episode comes from Barack Obama's published autobiography, and that the book makes it abundantly clear that the old lady confessed her fear of one certain black man (single), not black men (plural) in general.
There are plenty of other discrepancies in the content of Senator Obama's speeches, lovely written and delivered in “that sonorous baritone of his which makes his drive-through Macdonald's order of Big Mac, French fries and strawberry shake sound so profound” (to cite another columnist).
However, these speeches fall short of the instinctual honesty that Mr. Parris discovered.
Serge Barou
Welllington, NZ
Liz Babcock
March 30th, 2008 8:06pm Report this commentUnfortunately, it is impossible to determine how much of any speech is attributable to the person who delivers it, and how much to his or her speecewriter.
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