Obama Ipsum

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Yes We Can

I’m talking about something more substantial. And slowly, I came to realize that something was missing as well - that without an anchor for my beliefs, without a commitment to a particular community of faith, at some level I would always remain apart, and alone. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies. We were born out of revolution against an empire.

Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own. For eighteen long months, you have stood up, one by one, and said enough to the politics of the past.

I didn’t fall out in church, as folks sometimes do. There was even a time when the Christian Coalition determined that its number one legislative priority was tax cuts for the rich. So let’s rededicate ourselves to a new kind of politics - a politics of conscience. That’s the change we need right now. America, our work will not be easy. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.

If you’re working forty hours a week, you shouldn’t be living in poverty. Just as Muslims do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire. And yet Al Qaeda chose to ruthlessly murder these people, claimed credit for the attack, and even now states their determination to kill on a massive scale.

And he knows that it’s not enough for just some of us to prosper. But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. When John McCain said we could just “muddle through” in Afghanistan, I argued for more resources and more troops to finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11, and made clear that we must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights. Because it feeds into the cynicism we all have about government.

Thank you very much everybody.