By Jim Belshaw
Of the Journal
As he so often does, Jon Stewart got to the nub of the matter when he looked into a camera on "The Daily Show" and said: "He talked to us as though we were adults."
He was speaking of Barack Obama's speech last week. The summary came with the kind of feigned shock that makes such honesty go down a little more easily with laughter.
When the laughter quieted at my house, I found myself thinking again that I had never in my life heard a political speech like Obama's. We are not accustomed to politicians addressing us as adults, and intelligent ones, at that.
I suppose "political speech" should be qualified in that it wasn't really all that political, but it was given by a presidential candidate. Given the partisan wars we've waged for so long, everything has a way of becoming political.
Regardless of how you might qualify it, though, I've never heard anything quite like it.
In The Wall Street Journal, former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote: "It seemed to me as honest a speech as one in his position could give within the limits imposed by politics. As such it was a contribution."
Here's another shocker: He wrote it himself. That alone puts it in a special category.
So I have a suggestion. I make it with some trepidation.
Read the whole thing and see for yourself.
The last time I suggested people might want to go see something for themselves and make up their own minds rather than being influenced by all the talking heads and pundits, it didn't go well.
I made such a suggestion about Michael Moore's movie "Fahrenheit 911" and I got unfriendly e-mail for months, quite a bit of it going on at length about my pinko-Commie-socialist leanings.
I'm hoping for better this time. Obama's speech is important enough for us to consider in its fullness.
I've posted a link to it on my blog on the Journal Web page (AQBjournal.com). You can read it or watch it in its entirety. (If you Google "obama race speech," you'll find links galore, too.)
Here's a small part of it: "I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible."
I've always believed that of the United States of America. I've always believed we have a way to go to achieve it, but I've always believed we've had it in us to do so. I still do.
He asked that we consider one another, consider experiences we cannot imagine and how they might shape us.
He reminded me of a conversation I had with the late Fanny Irving-Gibbs. She died in 2006 at the age of 92. She was well-known in the Albuquerque community, a longtime volunteer, the recipient of the national Black American Heritage Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, the national Community Leadership Aware from the National Society of Black Engineers and many other honors.
She was 81 when she said to me: "We are categorized. All groups of people are to a certain degree. African-Americans are confronted with these things daily. I truly don't believe there is an African-American anywhere who can say he has not been confronted in some way."
Obama asks us to consider the things we don't know, and the things we do know, as well; he asks us to speak about them as adults.
Find his speech. Read it. It's worth your time.
Write to Jim Belshaw at The Albuquerque Journal, P.O. Drawer J, Albuquerque, NM 87103; telephone— 823-3930; e-mail— jbelshaw@abqjournal.com.
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