With a Powerful Speech, Obama Offers a Challenge
By BOB HERBERT
Barack Obama was on the phone, speaking about the one issue he had not wanted to focus on in his campaign: race.
He had just given his speech on race in Philadelphia and was expanding a little on the need to get past the endless back and forth on this toxic and frustrating issue. He said he had hoped in his speech to accurately describe the “chasm of misunderstanding” that continues to foster racial division, and to offer a way to “get out of that situation.”
The speech, which has gotten wonderful reviews, should be required reading in classrooms across the country — and in as many other venues as possible. With a worldview that embraces both justice and healing, Senator Obama is better on these issues than any American leader since King.
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“We have a choice in this country,” the senator said in his speech. “We can accept a politics that breeds division and conflict and cynicism.”
Or, he said, Americans could move in a different direction. “At this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, ‘Not this time.’ This time, we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native-American children. ...
“This time, we want to talk about how lines in the emergency room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care. ... This time, we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life.”
The great challenges this country continues to face — challenges linked to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the threat of terror, a failing economy, climate change, and on and on — cannot be solved, Mr. Obama said, in an environment riven by divisiveness and hostility.
Listening to Senator Obama’s speech, it wasn’t Dr. King who first came to mind but Bobby Kennedy, standing on a flatbed truck in Indianapolis on a cold, windy night in April 1968. Kennedy had to tell a crowd that had gathered to hear him speak that King had been murdered.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/opinion/25herbert.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print***
AUDIO OF RFK's majestic statement on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s death --
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gigsZH5HlJAVIDEO OF OBAMA's "A More Perfect Union" speech --
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWe7wTVbLUU
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