thanks, Kurt, for demonstrating how easy it is to spread the lie that Obama has no substance. of course, if you listened to a basic stump speech, visit his website, watch a debate, read some articles, you'd find Obama, like Hillary & Edwards, has a substantial platform. he has plenty of specifics, and your rhetorical device is a cheat. if you don't support him, just say that. and say why you do support another candidate. but don't use one of the classic dirty tricks, a variant of the straw man, to "prove" the lack of substance.

"The division, the stereotypes, the scapegoating, the ease with which we blame the plight of ourselves on others — all of that distracts us from the common challenges we face: war and poverty, injustice and inequality. We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing each other down."

DeanOR, if you cannot identify what Obama is focused on specifically, you've simply not done the homework. the Ebenezer address was not about specific policy issues, but he addresses these regularly. his website has very specific issues. he may not be as wonked-out as Hillary, but he's got an excellent handle on most issues. i don't know what you're complaining about here. that he's not King? that he didn't name names yesterday? or did you not hear him say that he wants unity among those who oppose injustice -- not that he wants "everyone" to join together. he expects, as he said, severe opposition, not from the KKK but the corporations and others who want to retain power.

it's very trendy to say Obama is light on specifics, but it's simply not true.

The King Day speech seems to me to be rather more complex that Obama's usual invocations of unity and bringing people together (though he may be making similar speeches in South Carolina). The reason is that he is addressing two audiences simultaneously -- a black audience, and a general audience (which also includes black people).

So some of the "unity" he was invoking yesterday was explicitly the unity of African-Americans in their continuing struggles, in part a response to some black critics who argue that Obama has abandoned the agenda of specific black needs (a.k.a. "not making race an issue," per the white-dominated press, treated as a source of "unity"). I think it is great that it inspired T.A. Barnhart to identify with that part of what he was saying, and to see himself as part of the continuing struggle for equality. And those parts were reasonably well-aligned with Martin Luther King's statements on such unity I think.

But at other points he still was invoking his broader appeals for unity & bringing people together & non-partisanship and so on. And as DeanOR has suggested, those broader thematics at best sit uneasily with King's approaches to the struggle for social justice beyond civil rights.

To me the point is not that Obama lacks specifics -- although his website has no search function so you can't find out what he thinks about anything not framed in his big issue brackets or in the misnamed Answers section that is really a glorified FAQ list. (I know because in response to something Chuck Butcher wrote I went to try to find his position on gun control/2nd amendment issues, & it's not on the site). Obama has plenty of specifics, and a lot of them go too far for my taste into premature compromises with corporate interests -- if this is where he's starting, the process will pull the outcome even further in the business direction. But that will be variations in detail and not kind from Clinton.

To me the point is that Obama makes unity a good in itself, and defines it too much in terms of compromise. There's a reason why the word compromise has a positive air. But there's also a reason why we say that someone failing to achieve a standard, or blocked from doing so by divided commitments, is "compromised". Obama shows little concern for the risk of the latter.

On this, Obama is quite different from King. King rejected claims that he should compromise in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail to a group of white ministers. He did not mince words in criticizing what needed criticism -- consider this passage from early in the "I Have a Dream" speech. Referring to the promises of equality in the nation's founding documents, he said:

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

I cannot imagine Barack Obama saying anything like that. His whole "unity" campaign is partly premised on not saying things like that, which tend to make many white folks uncomfortable. And they still do need to be said, because while at the behest of King's movement and invoking the memory of the martyred JFK to go farther than Kennedy either wanted to or could have politically in 1964, Lyndon Johnson got Congress to write a partial payment at the level of formal equality before the law, the substance of equality still has not been created and the quest for it largely has been abandoned.

Later in the speech, King said:

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

How easily does that sit with Barack Obama's idea of what it means to bring people together, with, say his temporizing and advocacy of less than universal healthcare, with his compromises in energy and global warming on coal-fired power plants and the gradualist cap-and-trade approach to corporate carbon emissions, as opposed to a carbon tax?

While Obama certainly would agree with King's endpoint in this section, would he ever speak so clearly about the obstacles to getting there, name the true character of the people in the way? Wouldn't it be too divisive?:

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

Now if Obama gets a T.A. Barnhard to see himself as part of the continuing movement for racial equality, and that lasts and T.A. acts on it, and lots of other people do too, and do so seriously enough that they accept that they are going to feel uncomfortable along the way, that would be good, and prove my fears about Obama wrong. It is tremendous that he has had that effect on even one person.

But I lack faith it happening more widely, or lasting, because on other days than MLK Day, Obama isn't asking this of us. Barack Obama says he's asking me to believe, right on the top of every page of his website among other places, but I don't. I can't. I'm not a person of faith, in several senses. This separates me from Martin Luther King, Jr. in a different way from how Obama is separated, for Obama's call for faith is close to King's, at least at times.

King's views about unity were complex, and deeply rooted in his Christianity and his vocation as a minister. He knew well the passage from Matthew 10:34 that the King James translation of the bible renders "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." In the context of a faith I don't share with King, that is a truth claim: "I have come to proclaim the truth, and the truth is divides." And it gives Jesus' wider advocacy of peace and lovingkindness an edge -- it is not peace at all costs. As King put it, "peace is not the absence of violence but the presence of justice." And getting to justice is not always a unifying process along the way.

King saw justice in terms of divine judgment. Both in Letter from a Birmingham Jail and in his at Selma, Alabama in 1965, after an episode of brutally vicious police violence against a march to Montgomery, King invoked "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", not a conciliatory or compromising choice in a South where whites were resurrecting the Confederate battle flag and putting in their state flags (remember that the next time someone says it's about "heritage not hate").

Mine eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the coming of the Lord He is trampling out the vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored He has loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword His truth is marching on

In doing so, King was invoking the old radical abolitionist view of the Civil War as a great judgment upon the nation for our collective sin of slavery. In the song there is a chilling sort of joyous bloodthirstiness, or can be; when King spoke the words their tragic sense was stronger.

But still, King spoke frequently of struggle. In a certain sense he was an existentialist, a fatalist, about the necessity of struggle in this world, for perfection as he saw things lay beyond this world; yet he saw the consequence of his faith in salvation from human imperfection the necessity of following the injunction to pursue justice and love in emulation of Jesus, action that does not in itself save, but is necessary to embody the faith that does, as he saw things.

King's goal was not division. We know the phrases it is more popular to remember from the "I Have a Dream" speech. His other speeches are replete with similar images, all set in an imagined and rather distant future, not perhaps as unreachable as heaven, but no easy walk either. Still, the goal remained. As he also said at Selma:

Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding. We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.

That, more or less, I can imagine Barack Obama saying. And if he can help us move closer to being a society with some legitimate claim to a right to live with its conscience, rather than our current soporified complacency, more power to him, or them.

But I greatly fear that Barack Obama may not be willing or able to challenge us to see that our current self-satisfaction is unearned, that we should not be able to live with our conscience as a nation, as things stand. I fear that before we really can move there, our conscience must first be revived, our complacency punctured. And I just don't have faith that Barack Obama understands that task, or would accept its necessity if he did. Right now, all of the ways he talks about unity through compromise tell me, probably not.

In a different way, I'm also not sure whether he'd be up to the task if he took it on, not that I know who would, though I think if he did try, he'd give it his best shot.

But maybe he will prove me wrong, if he wins. I hope so. The hope with which I hope so is not the hope he inspires in so many others, though. Rather it is a hope against hope.

T.A. Barnhard in one of the comments rightly questions whether holding Barack Obama up to the standard of Martin Luther King, Jr. is fair or the right standard. I accept that and it may be a fair criticism against some of what I've written here. On the other hand, the passion of some of his true believers makes me think this is a problem from another angle, and I wonder what will happen if he is elected and hopes pumped up to that level are not followed through.

Oh, on gradualism vs. the fierce urgency of Now, I forgot the occupation war in Iraq, and getting out of it. Silly me.

<h2>Obama's timeline would take it at least to the end of 2010, though that's better than Clinton, who says only that we should start pulling out troops.</h2>