Bernice King addresses the crowd at Invesco Field at Mile High
In the earlier post about about Jesse Jackson, I mentioned the underground buzz from a vocal crowd of the usual old school suspects about what they perceived to be the lack of significant visible connection to the history of the moment, specifically the proper recognition of the 45th anniversary of the March on Washington. But while Jesse Jackson took a positive spin on the history, others saw it as a new opportunity to attack Obama, while still claiming to publicly support him.
But in fact there was. The morning of the Big Speech, a prayer breakfast at the Denver Convention Center with LeVar Burton as the MC featured a number of speakers but most dramatically the Rev. Joseph Lowery who delivered a firestorm of a sermon/speech that brought the crowd to tears and even made Ted Koppel, who covered the event, a little misty. But the ceremony was sparsely attended relative to the number of Black delegates and attendees populating the halls of the Pepsi Center on any given day during the week. Certainly fewer people than the big black people party the night before given by the CBC.
Beyond that, the Rev. Bernice King, Martin Luther King III and Rep. John Lewis held a prominent position at the top of the Invesco Field program, following a touching video tribute to King that received loud applause from the diverse crowd. How much more did the “not enough” crowd expect?
In the afterglow of the speech and on panels during the convention, Julianne Malveaux, Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West were highly critical of Obama and his staff for not using his platform to aggressively addressing issues from reparations to Darfur to black liberation. But is that a legitimate argument given Obama’s position.
There are dozens of issues that Obama did not address in the speech, but that was not the purpose of the speech. His job on Thursday was to re-introduce himself to the American public (12% of who still think he is a Muslim) and to break down two years of visionary language into a bullet-pointed outline of fundamentals that spoke to the bottom line in American households. National security, the economy and the pocketbook were the themes he needed to hit and everything else feeds into those broad categories. His agenda was to, simply and plainly, come off as credibly presidential as a black man in still majority white America.
To turn the speech into a screed on black liberation would have been foolhardy and suicidal.
But the whole history and issue thing was just a jumping off point for what the real problem was. In bars and at lunch tables all during convention week, it only took a couple of Crown Royals to get people saying what they really felt and repeatedly Obama was criticized for his lack of familiarity with the elder generation of civil rights and political operatives. It was cast as a fundamental failing of the Obama and his campaign.
But is about Obama’s failure or is it about a basic resentment that when issues of public policy are discussed, the likes of Dyson, West, Tavis Smiley and others are not consulted on their opinions. Could the issue be that Susan Rice, Valerie Jarrett, Spencer Overton and a host of Obama’s advisors - black and white- are not on the “approved” list of black intellectuals.
What seems at the core of the anti-Obama criticism really is the issue of who is at the table when decisions are made and who is not, and a steadfast refusal to admit that there is a generation of of intellectuals, analysts and thinkers who fall outside of the League of Usual Suspects.
Should Obama not be criticized by his supporters? Of course not. He’s fair game and the people who are on his side should be the first to keep him on track. But certain folk need to be honest about their agendas. Obama is 60 days or so from likely being the next president. If you haven’t gotten a personal phone call by now, you need to loosen the ego and buy your own ticket on the train before it completely leaves the station.