Political Magic Is Also Misdirection
Mark Steyn also sees magic for what it is: misdirection. Only he sees it in Barack Obama's political magic.
And, of course, the senator's speech does share one quality with Cooper Union, Gettysburg, the FDR Inaugural, Henry V at Agincourt, Socrates' Apology, etc.: It's history. He said, apropos the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, that "I could no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother." But last week Obama did disown him. So, great-speech-wise, it's a bit like Churchill promising to fight them on the beaches and never surrender, and then surrendering a month and a half later, and on a beach he decided not to fight on.
It was never a great speech. It was a simulacrum of a great speech written to flatter gullible pundits into hailing it as the real deal. It should be "required reading in classrooms," said Bob Herbert in the New York Times; it was "extraordinary" and "rhetorical magic," said Joe Klein in Time – which gets closer to the truth: As with most "magic," it was merely a trick of redirection.
Obama appeared to have made Jeremiah Wright vanish into thin air, but it turned out he was just under the heavily draped table waiting to pop up again. The speech was designed to take a very specific problem – the fact that Barack Obama, the Great Uniter, had sat in the pews of a neo-segregationist huckster for 20 years – and generalize it into some grand meditation on race in America. Sen. Obama looked America in the face and said: Who ya gonna believe? My "rhetorical magic" or your lyin' eyes?
That's an easy choice for the swooning bobbysoxers of the media. With less impressionable types, such as voters, Sen. Obama is having a tougher time. The Philly speech is emblematic of his most pressing problem: the gap – indeed, full-sized canyon – that's opening up between the rhetorical magic and the reality. That's the difference between a simulacrum and a genuinely great speech. The gaseous platitudes of hope and change and unity no longer seem to fit the choices of Obama's adult life. Oddly enough, the shrewdest appraisal of the senator's speechifying "magic" came from Jeremiah Wright himself. "He's a politician," said the reverend. "He says what he has to say as a politician. … He does what politicians do."
In the end, there is an immature quality to the grandiose claims by Obama. "We are the change we have been waiting for" comes across as vapid silliness. But it rolls so magnificently from Obama that some people don't notice.
The Wright issue has caused the Obama campaign some serious damage. Voters are not buying his sonorous, empty words quite the way they were. The curtain has been pulled away a little showing how the trick is being done.
By Sam, Saturday, 3 May , 2008 @ 9:17 am
Every time I see Mr. Obama on the TV these days he seems to be sweating. I am assuming that is is "flop sweat".
By martian, Saturday, 3 May , 2008 @ 11:47 am
All of the Obamessiah’s "great sayings" are nothing more than vapid platitudes. "We are the change we have been waiting for" - what the heck does that even mean? "Yes we can!" - yes we can what? It doesn’t referrence anything. His claim that he was the only one who got it right when he voted against giving the president the authority to go to war in Iraq. Unfortunately, based on the information that was available at the time, the information every country and intelligence agency in the entire world thought was correct, the Obamessiah got it terribly wrong. If the we had found the WMDs everyone, including most people in his own party, had expected to find, Obama would have been the tragically wrong odd man out. Even though we didn’t find the WMDs, I still think it was the correct decision. Sadam was one of our two most implacable enemies on this planet (the other being Osama) and had already (as we found out later from the Russian intelligence services) given orders to his Special Forces to start planning terrorist attacks on the United states both at overseas targets and on the mainland. Sadam had to go and it was better we did then, when he was weak, before his buddies that he was paying off in France, Germany, and Russia got the UN sanctions lifted and allowed him to rebuild his military.