"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast" -Oscar Wilde |
"The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself." -- Proverbs 11:25 |
"I've been reading the papers in South Carolina," Obama said before using a preacher's cadence to paraphrase Ford's remarks. "Can't have a black man at the top of the ticket." The crowd booed. "But I know this: that when folks were saying, We're going to march for our freedom, they said, You can't do that." The audience roared. "When somebody said, You can't sit at the lunch counter. … You can't do that. We did. And when somebody said, Women belong in the kitchen not in the board room. You can't do that. Yes we can." (At this point I can't reconstruct the remarks from my tape recorder because the screaming was too loud.) The crowd responded by chanting: "Yes, we can."
Obama is going to gain more from Ford's endorsement than Hillary Clinton is. It would have been too audacious, even for Obama, to so overtly link himself to America's civil rights struggles, but Ford's remarks invited him to. Obama will no doubt use that new portion of his stump speech again, and outside of South Carolina. The audience, well represented with African-Americans, loved it. "I got chills," said Constance Eikins, an African-American stay-at-home mom. "It's very overwhelming. I am happy at the thought of it. We have come a long way."
Labels: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton