"Strong enough to be self-critical": Obama's handwritten additions to Selma speech

As I noted at the time of Obama's Selma speech,, the idea he expressed there that riveted respondents -- that America's greatest strength is its capacity to self-correct, in a never-finished drive to fulfill the promise embedded in its founding documents --  -- was not only not new, but was the same story that Obama's been telling continually since he first appeared on the national stage, and probably before. He did take that message to a new level of clarity at Selma, while expanding the circle of those he credited with fighting that fight and advancing the "always perfecting, never perfected" narrative.

Today the Washington Post is out with a hand-edited draft of the speech. It turns out that Obama handwrote-in the most direct expression of its core idea. And he pointed it directly at his most recent critics -- e.g., Giuliani, who had recently charged that Obama doesn't love America -- contrasting his brand of patriotism with a cardboard boosterism "based stock photos or airbrushed history."

Here is that passage with the handwritten addition bolded, an omitted portion in strike-through, and a later addition in red type:

...Selma is not some outlier in the American experience. Even today, we continue have debate about what it means to love this country, to be a true patriot. But what greater expression of faith in the American idea, what greater form of patriotism is there, than to believe that America is not yet finished, that it is strong enough to be self-critical, that each generation can look upon its imperfection and say we can do better.  That’s why it’s not a museum or static monument to behold from a distance. It is instead the manifestation of a creed written into our founding documents: "We, the People....in order to form a more perfect union."

Palin learns quick: torture is American

On genteel PBS, the talk after Sarah Palin's convention speech was all about her skilled punchline delivery, and her poise, and her hockey mom persona. How low we've sunk.

Palin's run through her own resume was fine. Her tributes to McCain were pro forma. Her showcasing of her own family was a bit over the top, but they're a political asset you can't blame her for exploiting.

Her self-branding joke - what's the difference between a hockey Mom and a pit bull? A hockey Mom wears lipstick -- was appropriate, as the latter part of the speech demonstrated.

Her attack on Obama was despicable -- a shameless catalogue of lies and distortions.

The worst first:

Al Qaida terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America, and he's worried that someone won't read them their rights.

Won't read them their rights. That's Republican-speak -- now at last adopted with full throat by the McCain campaign -- for "will stop inflicting on suspected terrorists every torture that was inflicted on John McCain by the North Vietnamese" and/or "will not seek to hold suspects indefinitely without trial or without the right to challenge their imprisonment. " This in a convention in which every major speaker has rehashed those tortures that McCain suffered -- while none until Mike Huckabee last night dared use the word "torture" to describe the litany of stress positions, caging, temperature extremes, beatings and mental torments they catalogued (Palin used the oddly tortuous phrase "torturous interrogations").

As late as last February, McCain was still better than his opponents on this issue of issues. While Romney boasted that he would "double Guantanamo" and Giuliani dismissed sleep deprivation and long standing as minor discomforts, McCain -- who had suffered those tortures -- still said that Americans must not torture. True, by that point he had brokered compromises that left the CIA free to continue tortures prohibited to military personnel, and voted against a bill that would end their exemption. Then, this June, he excoriated the Supreme Court for upholding terrorist suspects' habeas rights in Boumediene. But he had not yet sunk so low as to taunt those who want to restore America's honor by rolling back the Bush torture regime. Now, his henchmen are handing that fascist red meat to his top surrogate. And she, Christian paragon, is happy to mouth the slurs.

Equally defamatory was this:

This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting and never use the word "victory," except when he's talking about his own campaign.

Obama has laid out a very clear set of military priorities -- drawing down troops in Iraq, diverting some to Afghanistan, and concentrating our energies there and in Pakistan to "finish the fight against al Qaeda" -- that is, to achieve "victory" against that terrorist network. Obama has contrasted his policy clearly with McCain's, claiming, with evidence, that McCain went to sleep over Afghanistan while al Qaeda and the Taliban regrouped.

But Obama has never suggested that McCain did not want "victory" against any adversary, or that he put his personal political fortunes ahead of national security. That disgusting charge is of course embedded in the smear above.

Indeed, the theme that Obama "would rather lose a war than lose a campaign" -- as McCain has asserted repeatedly -- is literally the theme of the Republican Convention. "Country First" is meant to signal that Obama puts himself first. The vapid celebrity charge meshes with portrayal of Obama as a vain, self-serving cad who does not love his country. McCain's response to Obama's challenge to ban attacks on patriotism from the contest has been to double down.

Nor is this mode of attack a departure for McCain. He spent the Clinton years impugning Clinton's patriotism, charging repeatedly that Clinton put personal political gain ahead of the national interest. Assuming such motives in other politicians outside a core of chosen friends seems to be a McCain reflex.

Back to Palin. Those who have seen her in action affirm that she's a quick study. Charlie Black envisions her training for foreign policy leadership by "sitting at the feet of the master." Unfortunately, the masters she'll be studying from this fall are expert chiefly in Rovian campaigning, military adventurism, tax cutting to the point of national ruin, and destruction of civil liberties.

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A knowing tribute to Lincoln

Obama is understood to have a bit of a fascination with that prior state legislator from Illinois, Lincoln. Allusions and the occasional fleeting impersonation are peppered through Obama's speeches and stagings. Perhaps that's why, while reading through Obama's June 30 speech on patriotism, I was struck by a little cold-eyed, split-second qualification to a paragraph's paean to Lincoln. Here it is:

Abraham Lincoln did not simply win a war or hold the Union together. In his unwillingness to demonize those against whom he fought; in his refusal to succumb to either the hatred or self-righteousness that war can unleash; in his ultimate insistence that in the aftermath of war the nation would no longer remain half slave and half free; and his trust in the better angels of our nature - he displayed the wisdom and courage that sets a standard for patriotism (my emphasis).

Lincoln's ultimate insistence was long in coming. At the outset of his term, he insisted he was not out to take away anyone's slaves; he famously said that if he could preserve the union by preserving slavery, he would do it; he took the nation through two years of war before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. To me, that adjectival toss-in suggests that nuance is reflex to Obama.

In that nuance I hear Frederick Douglass, who took Lincoln's full measure, catalogued all his betrayals (from one point of view) of black people, and somehow, in his Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln , folded a clear-eyed and pained recitation of those betrayals into one of the most moving orations ever spoken in tribute to a fellow human being:

Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.

As a way to celebrate the 4th, no one could do better than read this speech of Douglass's, delivered at the unveiling of The Freedman's Monument in memory of Lincoln in Washington, D. C. in April 1876. His pain in acknowledging that Lincoln "was preeminently the white man's Pesident, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men" is palpable, but it's only prelude to his appreciation of the man's transcendence of his own prejudices and smaller concerns. Douglass eulogizes Lincoln in words as purged of anger as those of Lincoln himself, in his second inaugural address:

Though high in position, the humblest could approach him and feel at home in his presence. Though deep, he was transparent; though strong, he was gentle; though decided and pronounce in his convictions, he was tolerant towards those who differed from him, and patient under reproaches. Even those who only knew him through his public utterance obtained a tolerably clear idea of his character and personality. The image of the man went out with his words, and those who read them knew him.

To give way for a moment to Obama's own conceit: is it too much to hope that we can look back some day and say something similar about him?