Josh Marshall has some thoughts on Barack Obama’s speech at the DNC, with some favorable comparisons to Clinton’s Monday night appearance. Both speeches were anchored on a theme of unity, reminding the audience that the Republicans need a divided America, need to pit people against each, to win.
He excerpted this passage:
Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.
Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.
There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.
The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.
We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.
There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq.
We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
I think about those spin masters and negative ad peddlers and their paymasters and how blinded they are by ideology and hatred that a message of optimism, of faith and hope like Obama’s, will never reach them. They’ll shut it out, they’ll filter it into a handful of hateful code words before it ever reaches their ears, let alone their souls. I read the speech and I can’t see what there is to dislike, what there is to sow distrust. But someone, somewhere, was spinning that speech with its unabashed declaration of love of and faith in America as something else, something perhaps unrecognizably different.
What a sad and meaningless way to go through life.