Obama seizes turn at dream
President echoes struggles, progress made in 50 years
President Barack Obama’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington underscored both the great advantages of the presidency and its daunting limitations.
A forum in which an individual has to compete with the famously loquacious Bill Clinton and the ghost of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. could make fearful any speaker, even the confident Obama. His effort did not carry the drama of King’s speech — a near impossibility — and also lacked some of the easy familiarity with which Clinton, a child of the segregated South, talked about the importance of events 50 years ago.
Still, Obama did seize an opportunity, nationally televised, to extend and update the reach of the civil rights movement into current times, emphasizing its relevance to a nation which, if its black/ white schisms are nowhere near healed, finds itself riven along many more demographic and cultural fault lines.
In a section of the speech that he attacked with visible ardor, Obama offered evocative praise to those who had given their time and, in some cases their lives, to the cause. He also upbraided both black and white Americans who “lost their way” over past decades, implicitly blaming both blacks who had taken to citing poverty and bias for their troubles and whites who turned against government as part of the solution for the nation’s woes.
With that, and his assertion that the struggles of 50 years ago were echoed by those of women, Latinos, gays and others in present times, Obama sought to connect the country inwhat was essentially a restatement of his rationale for running for president.
“Change does not come from Washington but to Washington,” he said to the thousands gathered on the National Mall before the Lincoln Memorial.
But the limitations of leadership — and the conflicts forced upon leaders— also were evident. There was a lingering sense of the tightrope that Obama has always walked, between one role as a blackman with an understanding of the community’s needs and another as president of an entire nation of polyglot demands. He treaded softly on two recent issues of racial impact— the killing of Trayvon Martin and moves in state legislatures to curtail the right to vote, issues that have touched AfricanAmericans profoundly.
That light touch is familiar: Obama’s positioning was similar toKing’s in1963. The civil rights leader and his aides toned down a fiery speech that was to be given that day by now- U. S. Rep. John Lewis, D- Ga., concerned that it would drive off other allies in the civil rights coalition.
More to the point, though it went unmentioned by Obama, the day demonstrated anew how events outside a president’s control can alter the course and focus of a presidency. On Wednesday, Obama came to the celebration of King’s pursuit of nonviolence even as his aides were laying plans for what is expected to be violent retaliation against Syria for its alleged use of chemicalweapons.
Bill Carrick, a Democratic political strategist based in California, noted that foreign policy, in particular, had overtaken the last three presidents— Clinton, flummoxed by the Balkans, and George W. Bush with Iraq and Afghanistan — even if they came into office with far different plans.
In recent days, he noted, Obama had tried to focus on domestic concerns.
“The irony is the president goes on a tour of smaller communities, talking about economic challenges ... and then there’s the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and all of that is taking secondary importance to ‘ What is he going to do in Syria?’ ” Carrick said. “It’s the perfect extension of this whole trend.”
In the end, the most significant part of Obama’s appearance may not have been anything he said or didn’t say. It may have been that he was there at all, a black president representing a continuum of advancement unimaginable 50 years ago.
“Because they marched,” Obama said of the 1963 attendees, “America became more free and more fair — not just for AfricanAmericans, but for women and Latinos, Asians and Native Americans; for Catholics, Jews and Muslims; for gays, for Americans with a disability. America changed for you and for me. And the entire world drew strength from that example.”
Near him was a simple bell. It once had hung in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., where weeks after the 1963 march a bomb went off, killing four black girls. Before the president spoke, those on stage had rung the bell, time and again, for the living and for the dead.