Ainda não tive a oportunidade de ouvir o discurso de Barack Obama proferido hoje na Pennsylvania (o vídeo já está no vPod 2008). Mas aqui ficam algumas reacções de alguns comentadores, apoiantes e críticos:
Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish
I have never felt more convinced that this man’s candidacy - not this man, his candidacy - and what he can bring us to achieve - is an historic opportunity. This was a testing; and he did not merely pass it by uttering safe bromides. He addressed the intimate, painful love he has for an imperfect and sometimes embittered man. And how that love enables him to see that man’s faults and pain as well as his promise. This is what my faith is about. It is what the Gospels are about. This is a candidate who does not merely speak as a Christian. He acts like a Christian.
Ben Smith, Politico
A smart colleague notes that this speech is the polar opposite of this year’s other big speech on faith, in which Mitt Romney went to Texas to talk about Mormonism, but made just one reference to his Mormon faith.
Obama mentions Wright by name 14 times
Charles Murray, NRO
I read the various posts here on “The Corner,” mostly pretty ho-hum or critical about Obama’s speech. Then I figured I’d better read the text (I tried to find a video of it, but couldn’t). I’ve just finished. Has any other major American politician ever made a speech on race that comes even close to this one? As far as I’m concerned, it is just plain flat out brilliant—rhetorically, but also in capturing a lot of nuance about race in America. It is so far above the standard we’re used to from our pols…. But you know me. Starry-eyed Obama groupie.
Marc Ambinder, The Atlantic
The sell will be easier for white liberals, I think. The speech was magnificently written. It was internally consistent with Obama apparently believes.
How it plays will determine how it plays. If the media focuses more on the Wright defense-by-renouncements and then juxtaposes them with clips of Wright’s comments, then I think the trouble remains. The seeds of doubt about who this guy really is may be nourished. I know that Obama believes that a discussion about race plays to his benefit, no matter what people think about white working class voters and their latent feelings. Perhaps this is the beginning of his opportunity to lift the veil and get everyone — not just himself and the media — to talk openly.
Problem is… so far, this is a one way conversation. It’s … well, the tiny media scrum debating Rev. Wright… and Obama preaching to the country. There’s no give. There’s go back and forth. A one way conversation is a lecture.
The first is the way the speech will be filtered through the media. Many headlines are already focusing on his condemnation of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s rhetoric. But Obama also refused to rhetorically dump Wright. Instead he argued that “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.” This is a complex and nuanced point–one which, taken from the context of Obama’s larger assessment of race in America, won’t satisfy people horrified by a preacher who blamed 9/11 on U.S. policies. Other headlines are likely to focus on Obama’s overall call for racial reconciliation and a more perfect union. Obama said, quite rightly, that the recent flaps over Wright and Geraldine Ferraro “reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through–a part of our union that we have yet to perfect.” But the question is whether working class voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania and West Virginia and elsewhere believe, particularly in a stalled economy, that racially perfecting the union really ought to be a central goal of the next president. I would like to believe so. I’m not convinced they do. (A related point: Obama’s speech was almost entirely devoted to the black-white divide. As a strategic political matter, he may have inadvisably glossed over the role of Latinos, who foster as much resentment towards black America as do whites.)
Publicado em Barack Obama, Candidatos Democratas, Discursos, artigos opinião
