Notes from the Democratic Convention

July 28, 2004

Notes from the Democratic National Convention

 

As we arrived in Boston, the big buzz around the convention was Bill Clinton. Having staged a book-signing at a local bookstore to a packed audience, the fear was Clinton would suck all the oxygen out of the Fleet Center. His speech on Monday night was, indeed, vintage Clinton. Although it was dynamic and engaging, there was very little in it that was true. That's a nasty little detail that has never stopped him before.

 

However, outside of the presidential and vice presidential candidates, Clinton ended up not being the big story of the week. The man who overshadowed the convention was a state senator from Illinois named Barack Obama. His father was a goat-herder from Kenya who came to America in search of a better life. He met a fellow student from Kansas at the university they both attended in Hawaii and they were married back when mixed-race marriages were a rarity in the 1950s.

 

Barack Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961. He's a graduate of Columbia University and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. Obama is, no doubt, an American success story.

 

As I listened to his speech I was very much impressed by this obviously brilliant man who, according to his words, came from nothing. It was evident that Barack Obama would soon be a powerful force within the Democrat party. But much of what he said sounded like a Republican. He said that “parents have to parent, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.” That's the kind of language that gets one labeled an “Uncle Tom” if it comes from the mouth of a Republican. Just ask Clarence Thomas.

 

I was left with the impression that this first generation American came from nothing and clawed his way to the top of the American dream but Obama left out some pretty important facts.

 

His father abandoned him and his mother when he was only 2-years-old. His mother remarried an Indonesian man and they moved to Indonesia. Obama was sent back to Hawaii at age ten to live with his grandmother and it is she who deserves most of the credit for his success. The circumstances of his childhood are tragic but he was far from impoverished. His grandmother enrolled him in the same private school that educated the royal family of Hawaii. He lived in relative luxury and graduated with honors then made his way to the continental United States where he began living out the American dream.

 

Now in Chicago, Obama is vehemently opposed to school vouchers, even within the public schools, even though he enjoyed the finest schools that money could buy. Those children trapped in the poverty of the slums of Chicago don't have the choices he had. Those parents don't have the opportunity to take their children out of the ghetto and put them into a better performing school because Obama and others are standing in the schoolhouse door.

 

He strongly advocates pouring more money into AIDS research to the detriment of other more deadly diseases for which research money is passed over to feed the greedy special interests who would rather spend more money than change their risky behavior.

 

Barack Obama is certainly an impressive speaker and most who watched him at the convention will be wooed. But they have an expression in Texas, which aptly applies here. He's all hat and no cattle. The Republicans need to be asking, “Where's the beef?”