This is a throwback moment. I’ve been around long enough now to throw a little bone out into the internet here, as quiet a landing as it will make. My first job out of college was working on a book called Of the People: the 200-Year History of the Democratic Party. I became the book’s managing editor. Big names like Robert Reich, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Ann Richards, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith contributed to the book. It did well. I went to the Democratic Convention in New York and saw Bill Clinton make his nomination speech.
There is a quote I remember in the book:
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
32nd president of US (1882 - 1945)
Are we doing that now? As every Daily Kos regular who might have read this far knows, no, our current Administration has been doing the opposite of that. (Link here: Trump’s two-track strategy: The rich get richer, and the poor get distracted)
I occasionally, consciously think about Roosevelt’s quote. But also realize that in me, it internally established a defining, mutually exclusive belief intrinsic to the Democratic Party, outside the intrinsic tenets of the GOP. Obama’s speech reminded me of many things I admire about the Democratic Party, including this notion of providing for those of us who have little, not just providing abundance to those who already have much.
It helps that a man with the dignity and eloquence of Obama delivered that speech, replete with his appeal to the sense of goodness and fair play Americans traditionally embody.
We need to embrace being on the same team. We need to embrace looking after one another.
The contrast to the hateful and bizarre, to the the faux controversy train-wreck that we have now in the White House, and throughout today’s GOP, could not be more austere.
That’s been said everywhere, and here. I’ll not reiterate that.
But man do we miss Obama’s voice.
Historians will look back and mark that speech. Perhaps I’ll take time to dissect it too at some point.
For now, I want to enjoy the fact that it happened.
On such a large stage.
And for a man across the aisle politically from him. Who was on the same team.
Godspeed to Robert Mueller, and the eventual repenting and restoring of the GOP, or to its demise.
Here are two links to video and transcription of Obama’s John McCain eulogy speech:
I’ll leave this diary with a letter I wrote early on, in the New York Times, early in Obama’s Presidency. Flush with the optimism and intoxicated with the elevation of hope that occasionally flies within us, when we see something happen that we know is special, and that has the ability to transform us and propel us — individually and collectively — to higher places than we routinely travel.
What a beautiful speech President Obama gave in Cairo! With the pragmatism of Jefferson and some of the fire of Rumi, our new president is laying out leadership and vision we’ve desperately needed.
Despite the nit-picking of cynics, the substance is all there, and President Obama’s faith and citations of people believing in one another, and themselves, is exactly what we need at this time.
G. Colby Allerton
Albany, Calif., June 5, 2009