Obama's things learned in kindergarten

Just wanted to briefly note a few impressions regarding Obama's purportedly epic speech on race. From what I heard of it, it was an extremely fundamental Cornel-Westish explanation of some extremely simple racial matters that many people still don't get. As such, it is certainly salutary. I have not heard more than a small part of it, but I have a hard time believing that it is either the speech of Obama's life, which we hear about a speech of his every few weeks, or our generation's "I have a dream speech."

What I heard of it really was not so much about race ultimately, but about acceptance of those with differing views. As such, it hits away at a consistent theme of the Obama candidacy, which is again kindergarten-basic, but nevertheless bears repeating.

This is only because the American public consists largely of, well, I won't say idiots, but certainly people whose heads have been stuffed full of cotton candy by someone, whose arguments usually seem to operate at two or three levels of abstraction beyond their competence. The News Hour has been doing this thing where they sit and have focus discussions with highly unrepresentative samples of ordinary voters. Last night, for example, they had 4 Republicans (only one of them a non-Hispanic white), 3 Democrats, and 2-3 independents all sounding generally foolish on the Iraq war. Often you could hear the malapropisms and the highfalutin arguments with big leaps in logic and all sorts of faulty and missing premises.

So given this reality, it's good for a major speech, or a major campaign for that matter, hit on the idea that you can disagree with someone vicerally and still respect them, love them, treat them with dignity, accept that they have rights, and work to get along with them and work together with them. If you're Obama, you have to because you're between different groups. The implications of this are numerous: (1) we can negotiate with evil leaders on the world stage; (2) we should cut some slack for people like Geraldine Ferraro, who dare open their mouths on race, because we'll never have a productive discussion if we don't include some room for people to say dumb things; (3) it's possible for someone to say "God damn America" and still love America -- in fact, taken in context, Jeremiah Wright was obviously speaking negatively of the government, and not all the people of America, something conservatives regard as the blessed duty of patriots when they themselves do it with somewhat different language; (4) liberals and conservatives can give their all to defeat each other and each other's policies in the political arena, and still observe some boundaries, show personal respect, play by some rules, and seek common ground where possible.

This is all very basic and obvious, but it means throwing out the us-versus-them frame of reference that studies find that most people, but especially conservatives, find to provide a comforting simplicity and clarity to their thoughts, even if it leads their thoughts to be wrong most of the time. If we knew that there was no simple us-versus-them, we might have allowed for Iraqis possessing some independent viewpoints other than pro-US/anti-Saddam versus the opposite.