News for August 29
August 29, 2008 by Barbara
Filed under News and Analysis
‘We Cannot Walk Alone’
Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president Thursday night at Mile-High Staidum in Denver. The full text and live-blogging commentary of the speech can be found at a variety of sites, (try here and here, for examples of the full text and live-blogging, respectively). Post-speech, bloggers have not only been talking about Obama, but about the community that helped bring about this historic moment and that sense of participation that the Obama campaign has worked to inspire.
Michael Tomasky at The Guardian | “Obama made his speech not about him but about his audience. He gave away some of his power this night and gave it to the people. … This to me was the single most important thing about the speech. There were other important aspects to it, and I’ll get to those, but the main victory Thursday night was that he successfully made the night not about him in a way that could feed into the Celebrity/Messiah/The One/He Who Makes the Clouds Part narrative that the McCain camp has so successfully deployed.”
Mixed Race America | “History doesn’t get made by individuals alone. History is made through completely mundane acts, such as someone taking the time to show up and listen to a civil rights leader speak in our nation’s capital. Or a U.S. citizen taking the time to become a delegate and to attend the DNC in Denver. Or for an average American on November 4 to get in his/her car or walk to her/his local polling station and casting a vote.”
Huffington Post | “Although one imagines Obama will be perfectly adept at coalition building, bringing home the bacon, and managing a bureaucracy, his overriding strength is that he communicates directly to the individual. Eighty thousand people, and every one feels like he’s talking directly to them.”
The Social Significance of Barack Obama | Contexts
The historical significance of the Obama campaign, as well as its implications for the future, have been the subject of pontification by pundits and politicans alike. We’ve assembled a collection of prominent sociologists to bring their expertise to bear on the question…
Stop Counting the Uninsured | Alas, a Blog
Ampersand at Alas, a Blog points to a solution offered by a McCain health care adviser to solve the issue of the number of uninsured Americans: Stop counting them.
Three Years After Katrina | The Brookings Institute
Greater New Orleans approaches the end of its third year of recovery from a position of strength, with the vast majority of its pre-storm population and jobs. But many recovery trends have slowed or stagnated in the past year as tens of thousands of blighted properties, lack of affordable housing for essential service and construction workers, and thin public services continue to plague the city and region. A strong federal-state-local partnership must continue to further the hard work of recovery, which is now well underway.
Frank Fukuyama was Right All Along | Foreign Policy Passport
Foreign Policy discusses Frank Fukuyama’s much-misunderstood and thusly most-maligned idea — the end of History, as he outlined in his essay-turned book The End of History and The Last Man — and points to an essay Fukuyama recently wrote for The Washington Post about the age of autocracy.
Barbara Schwartz is the editorial director at the Xenia Institute. She lives in Oklahoma City, Okla., and currently is pursuing a Master of Divinity degree at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa.
