Racial Healing Marks Obama's Campaign

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Barack Obama's victory speech in South Carolina was quite moving. I particularly liked this reference at the end of his speech:

When I hear that we’ll never overcome the racial divide in our politics, I think about that Republican woman who used to work for Strom Thurmond, who’s now devoted to educating inner-city children and who went out onto the streets of South Carolina and knocked on doors for this campaign.  Don’t tell me we can’t change.

And these quotes reported in The Washington Post:

"Race doesn't matter!" the crowd at Obama's victory celebration in Columbia chanted, and when he spoke, the senator elaborated on the theme. He said his victory disproved those who argue that people "think, act and even vote within the categories that supposedly define us" -- that blacks will not vote for a white candidate and vice versa.

"I did not travel around this state and see a white South Carolina or a black South Carolina. I saw South Carolina," he said. The election, he said, "is not about rich versus poor or young versus old, and it's not about black versus white. This election is about the past versus the future." 

Emotionally, I want to say with him, "Yes!" And yet intellectually, I think he needs to put more meat on the bones of his policy proposals if he wishes to attract more skeptical Democratic voters who are suspicious of a campaign based on positive emotion and good feeling. The issues section of his web site does some of that, but not enough.

Related:

• With Obama's Electoral Progress, Among People I Know, Racial Healing Begins

Comments

[if_I_was_a_tree_I_would_hug_myself]

Multiple choice...

Whose words are these?

"It is useless to reopen wounds that seem scarcely healed;...useless to speak of guilt regarding men who in the bottom of their hearts, perhaps, were all devoted to their nation with equal love, and who only missed or failed to understand the common road."

A. Barack Obama
B. Adolf Hitler
C. Josef Dzhugashvili

Answer is B. Adolf Hitler wrote it in Mein Kampf, Volume Two (per Shirer, from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.)

The statement could have been made by either of the other two. Except C could have been eliminated by anyone who pays attention; Uncle Joe wasn't one for flowery speechs, and didn't care even to give lip service to healing.