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POLITICS-US: The Reinterpretation of Dreams

Ali Gharib

WASHINGTON, Aug 29 2008 (IPS) - In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and gave a speech that went down as one of the greatest in U.S. history.

The speech, delivered when lunch counters even in northern Washington were still segregated by race, was a bold challenge to the U.S. to live up the promises of equality laid out at its founding, and live up to them for all people.

“I have a dream,” said King before a massive crowd at the civil rights demonstration, “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Forty-five years later, to the day, after the famous “I have a dream speech,” many commentators speculated as to whether King’s dream had been at least partially realised with Sen. Barack Obama’s official acceptance of the Democratic nomination for the presidency of the U.S., making him the first black candidate to be nominated by one of the major parties.

The historic coincidence was not lost on Obama, who acknowledged the march on Washington and King’s dream in his acceptance speech before more than 80,000 people at Denver’s Mile High Stadium and, according to the Associated Press, 38 million television viewers at home.

“The men and women who gathered there could’ve heard many things,” he said of the 1963 demonstration. “They could’ve heard words of anger and discord. They could’ve been told to succumb to the fear and frustrations of so many dreams deferred.”

“But what the people heard instead – people of every creed and colour, from every walk of life – is that, in America, our destiny is inextricably linked, that together our dreams can be one.”

Togetherness was a theme of Obama’s talk, as it has been in the past, and he built upon it to make specific and compelling arguments for progressive programmes and ideals that would see the country rally behind principles of equality and collective responsibility for society.

“It’s a promise that says each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will, but that we also have obligations to treat each other with dignity and respect,” said Obama, railing against Republican Pres. George W. Bush’s corporate-friendly tax cuts and his administration’s failure to do things “which we cannot do for ourselves”.

“That’s the promise of America, the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation, the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper.”

Obama avoided the lofty inspirational speech that right-leaning commentators had predicted and were salivating for – hoping for the opportunity to blast Obama for good oration but lacking substance. Instead, he glazed over his biography and then discussed policies, often going on the attack against the Bush administration and its heir presumptive, Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain.

“What [Obama] didn’t do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric,” wrote Andrew Sullivan on his blog at the website of the magazine The Atlantic. “The McCain campaign set Obama up as a celebrity airhead, a Paris Hilton of wealth and elitism.”

“And he let them portray him that way, and let them over-reach, and let them punch him again and again … and then he turned around and destroyed them. If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check,” wrote Sullivan.

Attacks on Republicans notwithstanding, the theme of a nation unified in purpose was a fitting capstone to the four-day convention, where unity was a recurring theme.

From the start, it was well known that the convention had the potential to be a contentious affair. The primaries saw the Democratic Party split roughly down the middle, with half for Obama and half behind Sen. Hillary Clinton in her own historic bid to become the first woman to occupy the top spot on a ticket.

After Clinton suspended her campaign and conceded the nomination to Obama, many feared that she would hold back in throwing her support to Obama. But in her Tuesday speech, she unequivocally pointed to Obama as the only course for the future of the country.

In the most poignant moment of her speech, Clinton told her supporters that she had gotten in the race to help people, and that if her supporters wished to follow through on helping those in need, they should support Obama.

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC said that this was the major thrust of Clinton’s speech and that those of her supporters who weren’t convinced were lost causes.

Clinton’s husband, former Pres. Bill Clinton, also gave a ringing endorsement of Obama. Pres. Clinton’s stem-winder was much more a personal endorsement of Obama in contrast to Sen. Clinton’s attacks on Bush and McCain, and was well received by the Democratic faithful.

But for all the unity in with the Democrats in attendance, Obama will still have to prove himself to the electorate at large.

Obama’s slight lead over McCain in the polls slipped during the pre-convention, midsummer months to a relative dead heat. While in the Gallup Daily Tracking polls, the first signs of a “convention bounce” have appeared, with Obama opening up an eight-point lead Friday in national polls, many commentators are wondering why, in a year when the Republican brand, on the heels of a disastrous Bush tenure, is so weak, Obama has failed to open up a bigger lead.

In Roll Call, astute election expert Norman Ornstein compared Obama’s problems to those of Pres. Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election. While Reagan’s opponent, incumbent Pres. Jimmy Carter, was hugely unpopular, Reagan failed to open up a big lead until just before the election when he outshone Carter in a debate. Ornstein suspects that Reagan’s troubles may have come from his perceived inexperience on a national scale, bolstered by a lingering image as merely a Hollywood actor.

“The gap [between expectations and realities in the polls] suggests that Obama, like Reagan, will be unable to widen his lead significantly unless and until voters judge him as crossing the bar of acceptability as a president,” wrote Ornstein. “[B]ut the underlying terrain of the electorate and the election suggests that voters will move to him in sizable numbers if and when he does.”

Ornstein thinks that, like Reagan, Obama will have his chance in the three televised debates between Sep. 26 and Oct. 15.

But John Judis at the New Republic has a much more daunting reason for Obama’s lag – and one with broader implications that King’s American dream may yet be deferred. Judis suggests that Obama, as a black candidate, “starts the general election with a large handicap that he has to overcome.”

“Obama’s race reinforces whatever doubts voters might have about his ability to govern,” wrote Judis yesterday on the New Republic website. “As several psychological experiments have shown, white voters asked to compare white and black candidates of equal accomplishment will tend to view the black candidate as being less competent” and more left-wing.