When Obama Speaks…

Today in the Washington Post David Broder waxes (or perhaps wanes) eloquent about the insight into the mind of Obama that can be gleaned by paying close, careful attention to the words of Obama.

One of the things that sets Barack Obama apart from most politicians is how much can be learned from listening to his speeches….

… They have no equal in providing insights into the way his mind works and the context that guides his decisions.

The striking thing is the consistency with which he places concrete actions into the broadest historical or philosophical setting, and how much he is influenced in his decision-making by the reach of his intellectual exercise.

This first struck me during the crisis in the primaries when the racially provocative views of his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, came to public attention. In his Philadelphia address, Obama took the first steps to separate himself from Wright, but he also somehow managed in the pressure of a hard-fought campaign to compose what is likely to be seen as the most significant essay on race delivered by any public figure since the days of Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr.

My reaction is almost, but not quite, exactly the opposite. That is, I recognize the unfairness and overreaction of the first thought that popped into (or out of) my mind while reading Broder — the old joke about how you tell when a lawyer is lying (“His lips are moving”) — but I think that thought is still closer to what I think of Obama’s speeches than Broder’s paens of philosophical and intellectual praise.

No Red America or Blue America, just America, from the aspiring future candidate but who is now a president who is presiding over the most race-conscious administration in history (“wise Latina” “nation of cowards” afraid to discuss race, Van Jones, etc.). Can anyone, can even Broder, summarize the deep content of the Wright-induced Philadelphia speech? I can’t, but I vividly recall Obama’s unbelievable denials that he ever heard Wright’s rants in church. And what about the incessantly repeated need to bend the cost curve as the justification for massive health care reform? Or transparency in government when all major decisions about health care have been made behind the closed door of the Democratic caucus, except the ones in the closed mind of Harry Reid?

Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin admitted Friday that he is “in the dark” about the national health care bill currently under construction by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. In an exchange on the Senate floor, Republican Sen. John McCain asked Durbin, “Should we not at least be informed as to what the proposal is that the Senate Majority Leader is going to propose to the entire Senate?” Durbin’s answer: “I would say to the senator from Arizona that I am in the dark almost as much as he is, and I am in the leadership.”

Contra Broder, I think Obama’s many speeches are “just words.”