Obama Offers a Progressive Vision of Patriotism

I watched Barack Obama's speech Tuesday morning intently. The "pre-game show" of cable commentators predicted a somewhat grim outcome. What could Obama say that could possibly overcome his association with the words of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright? Would he throw his pastor on the train tracks? And even if he did, would he still suffer from guilt by association?

But then, for 45 minutes, I saw a man who for days had appeared somewhat at sea, buffeted by waves that relentlessly pushed him off course, seem to find his compass and chart a course directly into the eye of the storm. I saw a man with the inner confidence, and the steadiness of a captain who knew he was sailing on uncharted waters but needed to go there anyway, take the nation with him and land them safely on the shore.

The pundits were clearly stunned. They knew they had witnessed something extraordinary, a moment when time seemed to stand still and a politician in the midst of a withering electoral storm did the unspeakable: he spoke the truth. The unspoken, unspeakable truth. He told the nation that he understood what was happening in white barber shops and black barber shops, around white water coolers and black water coolers, and that we are neither free from our prejudices nor merely prejudiced in our respective grievances, and that in both our prejudices and our grievances, we have more in common than we know.

With the exception of commentators who pride themselves on their bigotry, the speech drew immediate, nearly universal acclaim, and I suspect that its lasting impact will mirror its initial impact. But as the great French sociologist Emil Durkheim described it, we live our lives in the realm of the profane, punctuated by moments of sanctity, only to return again to everyday life. And by nightfall, as I listened to reports of the speech on television, many of the talking heads had returned to the realm of the literal, the crass, and the profane: Did he distance himself enough from Reverend Wright? Did he condemn his former pastor enough to reassure white voters?

But the speech wasn't about Reverend Wright, even though the controversy surrounding pieces of his sermons was the impetus for it. Obama delivered a message that spoke to the conflicts and contradictions around race that have existed since the earliest days of this nation, and he delivered it in a personal way that spoke to his own history and his own complex response to his pastor's messages over many years. The speech brought to mind a passage written by the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson a half century ago in his psychobiography of Martin Luther, which could just as easily have been written last night. Erikson was describing that ineffable quality we call charisma, and the way an individual life history sometimes converges with the historical moment: "Now and again," Erikson wrote, "an individual is called upon (called upon by whom, only theologians claim to know, and by what only bad psychologists)," to lift his personal conflicts to the level of cultural conflicts, "and to try to solve for all what he could not solve for himself alone."

Obama clearly hadn't wanted to make this election about race. But the events of the last week led him to do what the nation has long needed to do: to have the kind of open conversation about race that Republicans have avoided because they've preferred to exploit it and Democrats have avoided because they've tended to fear it. We can't solve problems we can't talk about, and our better angels on race tend to be our conscious values. As numerous commentators described it, Obama led us to our better angels.

But from a political standpoint, at least as important as the primary message of his speech was a series of meta-messages he conveyed as much through his actions as his words. Obama's speech was in many respects a rejoinder to a number of questions raised about him over the last few weeks that contributed to defeats in Ohio and Texas.