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A uniter not a divider?

One speech got Jimmy Carter elected President of the United States. Barack Obama;s speech, compared to Carter;s, showed Obama doesn't seem to know what to say.

Georgia governor Jimmy Carter gave a pivotal speech for Law Day in Georgia in 1974 in which he spoke of the commitment to erase artificial barriers to the rights of American citizens despite hometown unpopularity. He described first-hand experience, and told how he had acted to change the example and the processes of government. He talked of institutional injustice -- that only the poor go to prison -- and efforts to assure balance. He didn't call out abstractly for justice; he itemized what needed to be done to assure it.

Columnist E. J. Dionne, on NPR, tried to praise Obama's speech saying it spoke to both sides of the racial divide. The implication was that that was somehow uniting. But that is why Obama's speech missed the point. It did not discuss the many greater things that, independent of color, we share as Americans, and that bring us together rather than divide us.

Obama believes he can bridge the gap between cultures but doesn't show he knows how to do it. Where Jimmy Carter provided examples, Obama proposed only his belief that he can.

At the end, Carter recounted Tolstoy's comment that he wrote "War and Peace" for the students, the housewives, the barbers, the farmers, and the army privates to explain that greatest events are, Carter related, "controlled by the combined wisdom and courage and commitment and discernment and unselfishness and compassion and love and idealism of the common ordinary people." Obama did not marshal that spirit.

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