Once more, slowly: Obama sends a signal through the noise

There was conceptually nothing new in the interpretation of American history that Obama voiced in his speech yesterday commemorating the passage of the 13th Amendment. Yet what an intense, somber, formal, meditative distillation it was.

As in his speech in the eye of the Reverend Wright storm in March 2008, and his speech celebrating the Selma march early this year, this speech reiterated the core Obama narrative:

• American history is a long quest to live up the principles articulated in the country's founding documents -- and to shake off the "original sin" of slavery.


• Heroes of American history have at critical junctures advanced that quest, widening the circle of those encompassed by the promise of equal rights and opportunity.


• It's incumbent on us today to write the next chapter in that history of bumpy, incremental progress.

What was different yesterday: There was more emphasis on the original sin, and less on the moments of glory. Three of the four "warriors of justice Obama cited were black, (Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King as well as Lincoln), keeping the focus on the "original sin" with less zooming out to other causes (women's rights, gay rights) than in other recent speeches.* Most of all, Obama was pushing back, obliquely but unmistakably, against the rising tide of nascent fascism in the current campaign: