Given all the anger and hatred of the crowds at the McCain-Palin campaign events, some thoughts from two great Americans that have particular relevance to what’s going on right now.
First, James Baldwin, from The Fire Next TIme:
If we — and. . .I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create the consciousness of the others — do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country and change the history of the world
Second, Martin Luther King, from Letter from a Birmingham Jail:
I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one direcly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
Both quotes from the first volume of Reporting Civil Rights, the Library of America’s fine collection. If you have never read Baldwin, do so — he is an American Orwell.
Take a moment to watch this clip. It’s from an Obama town hall appearance yesterday in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
At first glance, it seems pretty good. He says that “there should be no contradiction between keeping America safe and secure and respecting our Constitution.” He gets in a good shot in about the need to catch the terrorists before you worry about what to do with them. And he has a great line at the end: “Don’t mock the constitution. Don’t make fun of it! Don’t suggest that it’s un-American to abide by what the founding fathers set up.”
Those are all good points. The problem is that along the way, he violates two fundamental rules of messaging:
1. Don’t use your opponent’s talking points to frame your arguments. Obama did that on three occasions:
“Senator Obama is less interested in protecting people from terrorism than he is in reading them their rights.”
“You may think it’s Barack the bomb thrower, when in fact it might be Barack, the guy running for president.”
“The reason you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism.”
When you do this, you reinforce people’s preconceptions about you. If folks are already inclined to worry about whether you’re the right guy, then what they’re going to hear is that Obama is soft on terrorism, has a Muslim name, and is interested in protecting the bad guys.
2. Don’t try to convince people with facts. Obama spends over a minute explaining the concept of habeas corpus. He sounded like a professor. Most people don’t have any idea what the words “habeus corpus” mean. But they do understand the underlying principle: that sometimes, our government makes mistakes, and we need rules to protect innocent people from being thrown in jail indefinitely. They’ll understand that much more readily than talking about how this right goes back to before we were a country.
So what should have Obama said? How about something like this:
You know, all of us want to be treated fairly. You could say that’s the basic idea behind the Constitution and the Bill of Rights: do unto others as you would have them do onto you. In this country, we give people the chance to be heard. We promise them that they won’t be tortured. We say to them that they have the right to prove that they are innocent of the charges against them, and that they don’t have to incriminate themselves.
These are our core values. These are incredible gifts that the founding fathers gave to us. And these are the very things that our opponents are now mocking. How dare John McCain and Sarah Palin suggest that what was good enough for Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and Benjamin Franklin isn’t good enough for us.
Other than our familes, our freedoms are the most precious thing we have . They are what made this country great. They are the promise that all men and women are created equal, that we are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and, as you said so beautifully, ma’am, that we are the sweet land of liberty.
John McCain and Sarah Palin, just like George Bush and Dick Cheney, want you to believe that our security is more important than our freedoms. What you know and what I know — and what McCain and Palin and Bush and Cheney certainly should know is that we cannot have security without freedom. We cannot have justice without freedom. We cannot be America without our freedoms.
Those who suggest otherwise should be ashamed of themselves.
They should be ashamed for resorting to torture, for doing the very same things that John McCain himself suffered in Vietnam. They should be ashamed for letting places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, instead of places like Farmington Hills and Peoria define who we are. They should be ashamed for allowing waterboarding, beatings, sleep deprivation, and other techniques that we used to think only happened in places like Zimbabwe and Burma and Cuba. They should be ashamed of themselves for believing that it’s all okay because the President can do anything he wants anytime he wants.
That’s not my America. That’s not your America. That’s not George Washington’s or Abraham Lincoln’s or Teddy Roosevelt’s or FDR’s or JFK’s or Ronald Reagan’s America. Nowhere in our Constitution does it say the President can do anything he or she wants. Nowhere. That’s not Martin Luther King’s or Susan B. Anthony’s or Bobby Kennedy’s America. That’s George Bush’s America.
It’s time we reclaim our heritage of freedom, our role as that shining city on the hill. It’s time we say “not on our watch,” not here, not in Guantanamo, not anywhere.
It’s time that we say to Bush and Cheney and McCain and Palin and anyone else who supports them, we’re taking America back. We’re taking America back to what it stands for. We’re going to make America great again. We’re going to be the America that respects people’s rights, that honors our core values, that draws so many people around the world to our shores.
Let’s start showing the world why we’re better than our enemies. Let’s honor our founding fathers by returning to the values that make America America.
That would knock McCain and Palin on their butts. It would force them to explain why they support the very torture techniques that John McCain himself endured. It would make them explain why they aren’t un-American. It would require them to argue that they don’t want to destroy the Constitution or shred the Bill of Rights. Tar them with every sin of the Bush Administration, and do it in a way that will leave them no space to reply except by repeating your arguments.
That, after all, is exactly what they’re doing to the Democrats.
So for crying out loud, Senator Obama, stop defending yourself and start attacking them. It’s the only way you win.
P.S. To my colleagues in the blogosphere and the mainstream media, this goes double for you. Stop caring about how many times Sarah Palin lied about the bridge to nowhere and start talking about why Obama and Biden are the right choice. Stop parsing every lie that McCain and Palin tell and start talking about what their Administration would do to the country. And if you can’t, then shut the hell up.
The best quote of yesterday, perhaps of the entire convention season, came from a commenter on the Mudflats blog:
Jesus was a Community Organizer, and Pontius Pilate was a Governor.”
That got me thinking. Who else was a community organizer? Here’s a short list:
Mother Theresa (who got mentioned by the McCains more often than George W. Bush did)
Martin Luther King (who was featured in a RNC video earlier in the day)
Jane Addams (who campaigned in 1912 for Teddy Roosevelt, John McCain’s hero)
Abraham Lincoln
Nelson Mandela
Mahatma Gandhi
Vaclav Havel
The Dalai Lama
Aung San Suu Kyi
Thomas Paine
Mike Huckabee (yes, even Mike Huckabee — he was a church pastor)
Oh! I forgot one!
Sarah Palin (member of the PTA)
See, here’s the thing, Governor Palin. Anyone who organizes in the community — whether they are organizing poor people or moose hunters, crime victims or gun owners, is a community organizer.
You might want to take a few minutes and read de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America:
There is only one nation on the earth where use is made each day of the unlimited liberty to form associations. . . . This same nation is the only one in the world whose citizens have conceived of making constant use of the right of association in civil life and have succeeded in procuring for themselves in this manner all the goods that civilization can offer.
Or was this one of the books you had banned from Wasilla’s library?
I wrote once before about the fact that Obama’s convention speech will take place on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. But since Patrick Appel, sitting in for Andrew Sullivan, is highlighting some of the debate over it on the blogosphere, I thought I would share some additional thoughts.
When people talk about the question of 1963 and 2008, they forget an inconvenient truth: that a given day often marks more than one anniversary.
Perhaps the best example of this is November 9th, which is the day that the Berlin Wall fell. When I recently suggested that Obama should give a speech in Germany on the 20th anniversary of that event (instead of last week), a reader emailed to remind me that 11/9 is not just the day the Wall fell, but also the day that Kristallnacht began.
The contrast for August 23rd 28th is not even remotely as stark, but it’s still telling. Yes, it will be the 45th anniversary of “I Have a Dream,” but it also will be the 40th anniversary of the day in 1968 when Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic nomination for President while anti-war activists and Chicago police battled on the streets outside the convention center. As Rick Perlstein points out in Nixonland, it was the day the New Deal coalition began to disintegrate.
Obama, of course, represents the best chance the Democrats have had since then to build a new majority coalition, albeit a creature very different from the one that fell apart forty years ago.
One day, three years. And on all three days, to use a phrase from ‘68, the whole world was/will be watching. The best speech Obama could give would acknowledge not just one anniversary, but both, seamlessly integrating them into a narrative of political redemption and national rebirth.
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