A Few Thoughts On Obama’s Speech to the DNC2012 – The Call for Community Trumps the Primacy of the Individual

Last updated on: September 7, 2012 at 8:28 am by Tim Suttle

A Few Thoughts On Obama’s Speech to the DNC2012 – The Call for Community Trumps the Primacy of the Individual 2012-09-07T08:28:16-06:00 Tim Suttle

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You can make anyone in public life sound like the devil if you cherry pick remarks, use them out of context, distort their true meaning, and leave out key details. Granted, some public figures make it easy to do (I’m looking at you Paul Ryan). But last night’s speech by Barack Obama was pretty long on spin. The attacks turn me off, and I don’t think they are essential for explaining the president’s rationale for why he deserves another four years.

Bill Clinton made the best case for Obama’s re-election on the previous night, and as things stand right now, I predict that it will be enough. The rationale is not that Romney is corrupt or inept, but that Obama inherited such an absolute mess from the previous administration, that it will take more than four years to bring it back. What Obama did a masterful job of last night – and Clinton the night before – was showing that there has been just enough progress to warrant another go.

There are a few key things the DNC 2012 did very well – better than the Republicans did in Tampa.

1. Fired up the Base – It doesn’t seem like the R’s love Romney in quite the same way the D’s love Obama. There’s an emotional element to the D’s devotion. It’s personal. The convention had much more emotion and energy. Those people are going to go home and work their tails off.

2. Tagged Romney as Bush III – The convention effectively tied Romney to the Bush era policy narrative, and there is enough similarity in their rhetoric to make the charge stick. Obama was able to sell the idea that he stopped the free falling economy, and in cases where his policies were not stalled or thwarted by R’s they worked: auto bail-out, foreign policy/Bin Laden, and so on. So when Obama asks if people want to go back to more of the Bush era policies, there is enough of a Pavlovian resistance that it might be the crucial difference for swing voters. In the end, Barack’s case is the same case that other Republicans ran on in the primaries: Not Romney.

3. Appealed to our Better Angels – This is where my faith colors my reactions to the two party narratives. The Republican vision accentuates individualism over community. The D’s narrative does the opposite in arguing that what makes the American experience exceptional is the sense of community, and a common destiny. Ron Elving wrote about this at NPR this morning. He said:

On offer in Tampa was a depiction of America as an entrepreneurial paradise, a place where hard work, innovation and prudence are all that matters. In this imagined America, there is nothing to discourage a motivated man or woman from building a business or expanding an inherited investment. Respect for private enterprise is the coin of the realm.

This week in Charlotte, we have seen a dream of America as a communitarian paradise, a place where racial, national and religious differences are subsumed in a surge of generalized opportunity and shared success.

Obviously, these two narratives are codependent, and neither is true in the absence of the other. They must be held together… I wrote a whole book about this, by the way, called An Evangelical Social Gospel. They are both true at the same time, and as a Christian, I believe that they are both wrong on so many levels. What I don’t like about the president’s rhetoric is that he says, “We’re right and they’re wrong.” Romney’s rhetoric is exactly the same and it bothers me as well.

What I want to say is they are both right, and they are both wrong. Only when the two sides are held together in mutual respect – each holding the success of the group over the success of the individual – will our society begin to heal the divides that separate us.

I have to give the American people credit for one thing. There seems to be a consensus that the Republicans in the House are more to blame for the Washington bickering than the president. I think this is accurate as well.

So when the people of this society consider the U.S. government and Washington on the whole, the major problem we see is that these two sides don’t know how to work together. In that situation the side whose whose narrative is “group over individual” has a distinct natural advantage.

The appeal to community is just a stronger call for our time. Everything else in our culture absolutizes the individual. It doesn’t help that the folks chosen to articulate the individualist message seem to be pretty cold about it. The truth is that President Obama is not more virtuous or smarter or even more qualified to lead so much as he is just on the right side of history at the moment. The individualist narrative is one of the false gods of our day. If he wins it will be because the community/oneness narrative is the right message for the time.

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