I’m watching Obama’s acceptance speech as I type – and it’s very good. I’ve read a good bit about how Obama doesn’t really emphasize race and racial issues on the stump. But in listening to the beginning of the speech, I realize that maybe he does – he just does it in code. For one, he speaks with the cadences and phrase repetitions of black preachers. But more interestingly, he uses language that can simultaneously be understood as (1) calling for political unity; (2) echoing the language of the civil rights struggle. In other words, he’s speaking to African-Americans without whites necessarily realizing it. Consider the following passage for instance, which I’ve already seen 5 times on the cable networks:
They said this day would never come. They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together. But on this January night at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do.
I don't get it. I thought what Obama was doing here was obvious. Is this really speaking in code? I always thought this was both deliberate and obvious. Obama is taking the language of movements and using it to drive his campaign. He's still a community organizer at heart, not a politician. They're similar, but not the same.
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