The Speech Obama Should Have Given
President Barack Obama's inaugural address was a sad, flat effort that cruelly wasted one of the grandest moments in American history: the swearing in of the first black president.
Perhaps you have to live here in Washington to feel the full intensity of the waste. Washington is a city crammed with monuments connected to slavery and the great war to end it. And it was on the steps of the grandest of those monuments, the Lincoln Memorial, that Martin Luther King delivered his "I have a dream speech." As King stood, his eyes would have faced directly at the centre of the west front of the Capitol -- precisely the place where Barack Obama would take the oath of office, five days after what would have been King's 80th birthday.
This moment meant a great deal to almost all Americans, including many who did not vote for Obama. Obama let them down. The costs of this missed opportunity are not immediately apparent. But they are real and large even so.
What should Obama have said instead? Something like this:
My fellow citizens.
Today, on the steps of this Capitol built by the labour of slaves, I see before me millions of faces, male and female, young and old, of every race and form. But it is not only these faces that I see. Beyond them I see the great monuments of our republic: the memorial to the Virginian slaveholder who declared that all men are created equal and trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just; the great column to the memory of the general and president who laid down his army and his power when his time was done; and beyond them the white marble seat of Abraham Lincoln.
From where I stand, my eyes are aligned with his. And I want to say to him today, if he can watch and hear: From this Capitol, you once pledged with malice to none and charity to all, to bind the nation's wounds and finish the work we are in. We in our millions are here to answer, Father Abraham, Your work has been finished, our wounds are healed.
And I want to say to another man, who once also fixed his face upon this Capitol front: The day you prophesied has come. We, all of us, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, can together say: "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
Our American story was once divided. It is now united. We are one people -- and as one people, we confront the grave new problems of our time ...
At that point, normal Democratic boondoggling could have resumed -- and who would have minded?
Why didn't Obama do this, or something like it? I can guess at two political reasons -- and I fear there may also be a third personal one.
Reason 1: The sad fact is that many of Barack Obama's African-American supporters would object if he declared King's dream fulfilled. Through the campaign season, many reporters found black voters who expressed uncertainty over the Obama candidacy. They feared he might lose. They feared even more that he might win. Then they would have to let go of old ways of thinking -- and perhaps also forfeit the benefits of America's vast and far-reaching system of racial preferences.
Reason 2: Eloquent as they were in 1963, Martin Luther King's words are no longer politically correct in 2009. I can almost hear the gasps of the political advisers: "Black men and white men? Jews and Gentiles?
Protestants and Catholics? What about women? What about Latinos? And don't forget -- we have to mention Muslims and Hindus!"
Reason 3: It's very striking that the one and only reference in President Obama's speech to the amazing changes that have come to the United States over the past half century was a purely personal one, to "a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant."
Obama is among the most intellectual man ever to have gained the presidency, but his intellect has always been turned inward. His first book ranks among the finest ever produced by an American president, but it is a book about himself and was produced not at the end of a distinguished career, such as Ulysses S. Grant's great war memoir, but before that career had even truly begun. Question: Is it possible that Obama could not see what was in front of him because his gaze was fixed upon himself ? Did he fail to comprehend what his inauguration meant to a nation because he was too preoccupied with what it meant to the man being inaugurated?
I don't answer the question. But I ask, and I worry.
Originally published in the National Post.