As it turned out, they were prescient. Now, eight
years later, President Obama returns to the podium tonight to deliver yet
another speech at the Democratic National Convention. In the intervening eight
years, the nation is so much different and, in many ways, not so changed at
all.
This is a story about then and now. It begins with
boundless optimism, born of the rosy afterglow following Obama’s 2004 speech
that some wanted to believe heralded a post-racial period in American history.
Of course, that’s not how the story has unfolded. Indeed, since that speech,
nothing about Obama’s time on the national stage has suggested a narrowing of
racial concerns in the nation.
Quite the contrary…. As President Obama’s ongoing
re-election campaign demonstrates, race remains a powerful and divisive force
in American politics and life. And despite President Obama’s efforts to ignore
or transcend its grip, as outlined in his 2004 speech, racism continues to
define him and his administration.
Is it possible that anyone could have predicted all
that has transpired? How could they have known? At the time of the speech,
Obama was a candidate for the U.S. Senate. Hardly anyone outside of Chicago
knew or could pronounce his name. Going from a stirring keynote address at the
DNC to the White House is, as he titled that speech, the audacity of hope.
After being informed in early July 2004 by the Kerry
campaign that he would be the keynote speaker on the second night of the
convention, Obama spent weeks writing in longhand what he wanted to say. There
was a lot he wanted to cram into the allotted 20 minutes, including his
personal narrative and his support for the party’s ticket—Kerry and his running
mate, John Edwards, a senator from North Carolina.
Relatively few Americans actually watched the speech
as it occurred, because the commercial networks didn’t broadcast it. Some 9
million people, a small number for television, saw it on the combined Public
Broadcasting System and cable outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and C-SPAN.
Since then, however, countless millions have watched
snippets or recorded versions on YouTube or elsewhere on the Internet, giving
that speech a kind of you-were-there immortality. It’s as if everyone who has
seen the speech was one of the delegates in the Fleet Center, waving the
blue-and-white signs and chanting “Obama!”
In the speech itself, Obama tapped into the campaign
themes. “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America,” he shouted
like a Baptist preacher. “There’s the United States of America.”
He touched the right buttons of faith, family,
devotion to shared values, and respect for national unity, as he eschewed
divisive wedge issues.
“We worship an awesome God in the blue states and we
don’t like federal agents poking around our liberties in the red states,” he
said to cheers. “We coach Little League in the blue states, and yes, we’ve got
some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in
Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people,
all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the
United States of America.”
Most revealingly, Obama used his personal story, his
interracial and foreign heritage, to great advantage. He talked about education
and the role it played in his personal development and how he rose from poverty
through hard work. And he linked it to the role of government to help make life
better for those who need it.
When he finished, many in the audience wiped tears
from their cheeks. And the political chattering classes anointed him as the
Democrats’ rising star. A trembling and emotional MSNBC host Chris Matthews
wasted no time, telling a cable television audience, “I have to tell you, [I
have] a little chill in my legs right now. That is an amazing moment. A
keynoter like I have never heard.”
Then, a few minutes later, he claimed the camera to
declare, “I have seen the first black president there. … that speech was a
piece of work.”
Matthews was, perhaps, the first to publicly link
Obama with the White House off the strength of that speech. But he wasn’t the
only one, nor the last.
Reflecting back from eight years ago, it seems as if
the part of the nation that cheered Obama’s 2004 speech believed what it wanted
to believe. For sure, there was a part of the nation lurking and plotting in
the shadows.
As Ta-Nehisi Coates makes very clear in a recent
article, “Fear of a Black President” in The Atlantic, racism has shadowed the
Obama administration from the moment it became clear he would be the Democrats’
nominee. No matter how hard candidate and then President Obama tried to avoid
the issue of race, his opponents wouldn’t allow it.
The rise of the Tea Party conservatives ensured it.
Their early opposition to the new president amounted to open racial hostility,
designed to render his every effort unworkable in the minds of white voters.
For the most part, those media stars and political
analysts who were so quick to praise and congratulate Obama after his speech in
Boston seemed slow to recognize, report, or repudiate the underlying racism
associated with the political opposition he met once in Washington.
In a very real sense, little about Obama has changed
since he burst on the national scene with his 2004 DNC speech.
He almost certainly won’t denounce the appeals to
racial fears that have stood in his way. It’s unlikely he’s going to argue that
conservative efforts to suppress votes through controversial voter
identification laws in largely urban, poor, and minority regions are a
not-so-subtle attack on black voting rights. I doubt he will draw attention to
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who infamously announced that
making the president a one-termer was his party’s “single most important” goal.
After all, the president is running for re-election.
Such obvious truth telling would destroy the Obama narrative. He’s not an angry
black man, and white voters are essential to his return to the White House.
What we have learned over the past eight years says
less about Obama and more about those of us who wanted to believe in his
message. We have changed as a hopeful collective of believers, but the world
around us exists as it has always spun us around. What Obama said in Boston was
true as far as what we hoped for, but never was what we saw and knew around us.
That speech was aspirational, not impending reality.
Perhaps, in the 20-20 clarity of hindsight, we now
see that it wasn’t Obama who failed to deliver his lofty visions and promises.
Rather, it was we, as a nation of his believers, who were naïve enough to
believe it was happening at all.
About the author: Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow
at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership
Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact
of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority
by the year 2050.
This article was published by the Center for
American Progress.
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