Obama´s Speech

So, today I read the text of Obama´s A More Perfect Union speech, and I gotta tell ya…it knocked my socks off. Took some Big Balls to say the things he said, especially considering the timing of the speech. To hear this perspective coming from someone who could be the President one day…well, I just thought it was pretty impressive. I can’t remember another time in my life that I felt proud of an elected official. I think the issues he talked about are things that we all know in our hearts, but choose not to address for whatever reason. For him to give voice to them on such a stage, to air out our centuries-old dirty laundry, laundry that NOBODY likes to think about, and at this point in the campaign, well…I can’t help but think a lot of his advisors were begging him not to do it, and good for him for doing it anyway.
I´m not sure how history will judge this speech. It’s sort of one-part spin control and one-part City on a Hill. Critics will say that he´s playing his own race card, or that he´s plucking the sour note of his relationship with pastor Wright while strumming on the heartstrings of Nationalism and Unity, and on an emotional level it´s certainly not on par with Dr. King or JFK (I didn’t think it was necessary to quote from his book, there is a lot of puffery in the middle, and the story about the girl in South Carolina at the end was lost on me for the most part), but that being said, for a serious presidential candidate to lay bare the dark underbelly of American history and sentiment, things we may all think and yet are not proud of, is something I never thought I´d see. For him to talk about Black Anger, White Guilt and Contempt, the legacy of segregation, the “shame and frustration among black men,” and the privilege of race…well, like I said…it knocked my socks off. Regardless of if or how History judges this speech, I think it´s safe to say that we were never going to hear anything like this from the mouths GW or Mrs. Clinton.
And I can tell you as an American Studies major at UT that there are college professors all over the country nodding their heads in approval at his viewpoint and his message and his courage…he having boiled down three or four semesters of lecture hours into a 6 page, 5000 word speech. According to the (VERY liberal) professors that I had in Austin, Obama is right, and the issue of race in America, and our reluctance to talk about it “in polite company” is at the very core of many of our problems.
Anyway, I didn’t really mean to say any of that when I started writing this. What I wanted to say was, having now spent nearly ten months in a country with a weak, ineffectual, out-of-touch and cockamayme government, it gives me a new perspective, and appreciation, for our own (possibly still cockamayme) government. as an American living outside of America, this feels like Something Big. Long before I left to come to Cape Verde, forever maybe, I was a pronounced cynic when it came to politics, but for the first time in a long time…maybe in forever, I feel like there is hope for change. (I know that sounds really cheesy, and that may even be his goddam campaign motto for crisesakes, but there it is.)
So anyway, without further ado (and assuming that I am not in violation of any international copyright laws, or acting contrary to the apolitical nature of the Peace Corps) here is the full text of Barack Obama´s A More Perfect Union speech, delivered March 18, 2008 at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.