OK, I want you to try and transport yourself
back in time with me. It's March 18th, 2008.
We're in this era, you know, just before smartphones
were everywhere. People are still clutching their
Blackberries. Right. No Instagram, no TikTok.
Yeah. That's still, what, a decade away? Over
a decade. And the Democratic primary. It's not
just a political race. It's this heavyweight
boxing match. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama.
And it has been going on for rounds and rounds.
I mean, it was an absolute gridlock. No knockout.
And every single delegate mattered. The energy
was just incredibly high. You had two historic
candidates. But then right in the middle of this
stalemate. The floor just drops out from under
the Obama campaign. Floor drops out. I think
that's putting it mildly. This was the moment
it looked like the wheels were really coming
off the bus. Yeah. We are talking, of course,
about the Jeremiah Wright controversy. And today
we're looking at the response to that crisis.
A speech called A More Perfect Union. And this
isn't just about, you know, reviewing a piece
of oratory. This is really about analyzing a
high wire act. We're looking at how a candidate.
who had built his entire campaign on being a
unifier, suddenly had to talk about the most
divisive topic in American history. Race. Race.
All to save his political life. The stakes were
just wildly high. And to really get why this
speech mattered, we have to understand the specific
kind of panic that was happening in March 2008.
Obama's whole brand is hope. He's the no red
states, no blue states guy. And then all of a
sudden, everyone's TV is just filled with his
pastor. The pastor for 20 years. Shouting some
pretty incendiary things. And that's the key
context. Yeah. It wasn't just that he had a,
quote, radical friend. It was that the clips
that surfaced completely contradicted the brand
Obama was selling. Yes, exactly. If you're the
uniter and your spiritual mentor is shouting
goddamn America from the pulpit. You start to
look like a fraud. I remember those clips just
looping on cable news. It was inescapable. ABC
News was broadcasting excerpts where Wright isn't
just criticizing policy. No, it's way beyond
that. He's saying the U .S. government invented
HIV as a tool of genocide. He's blaming the U
.S. for, quote, killing innocent people. And
the soundbite that really, really stuck, the
one that played on every single 24 -hour news
cycle, was him flipping God Bless America. To
goddamn America. Yeah, citing the Bible and blaming
the country for its treatment of citizens based
on their color. Politically, I mean, this is
a nightmare scenario. So Obama had to distance
himself. Right away. Right. He kicked right off
his African -American religious leadership committee.
He did. He issued all the standard political
statements. I condemn these remarks. This isn't
who I am. That sort of thing. But the standard
playbook just wasn't working. No, the bleeding
didn't stop. Because the question wasn't just
about the remarks anymore. It became, Barack,
you're a smart guy. You sat in those pews for
20 years. You baptized your kids there. Did you
not hear this? And if you did, why on earth did
you stay? Exactly. It attacked his judgment,
his authenticity. He was being painted as this
secret radical who was just playing a moderate
on TV. And the campaign is in full on panic mode.
They realize a press release is not going to
fix this. They need a reset, a hard reset. And
this is where we get into the weeds of the writing
process, which I just find fascinating. Me too.
This wasn't some speech that was focus group
for months. This was like a term paper do it
Don situation. It really was. He starts dictating
a draft. To his speechwriter, Jon Favreau, on
a Saturday night, he works all through Sunday.
I mean, this is a candidate in the middle of
a grueling primary. Who's staying up until 3
in the morning? 3 a .m. on a Sunday night, refining
the arguments himself. 3 a .m. I can barely write
a coherent email at 3 a .m., let alone a speech
that's supposed to, you know, define race relations
for the 21st century. And he was still editing
it Tuesday morning, right before he walked out.
He sends the final draft to David Axelrod, his
chief strategist. And Axelrod's response is just
legendary in political circles now. It is. He
reads it and just emails back. This is why you
should be president. Which is such a bold thing
to say when your candidate is about to go talk
about the original sin of America. So he chooses
Philadelphia, the National Constitution Center.
He's not doing this at some rally with cheering
fans. No, the setting is very somber. It's academic.
He walks out. flags behind him, and he doesn't
start with a soundbite. He starts with the Constitution.
We the people in order to form a more perfect
union. He's grounding the crisis in the bedrock
of the country, but he also grounds it in his
own story immediately. He doesn't run from his,
quote, exotic background. No, he leans right
into it. He has to. He reminds everyone he's
the son of a black man from Kenya and a white
woman from Kansas. And he says that great line,
in no other country on earth is my story even
possible. Right. He's positioning himself as
the physical embodiment of the American experiment
itself. But then he has to pivot. He can't just
talk about the Constitution forever. He has to
talk about the guy shouting on everyone's TV
screen. And this is the strategic pivot. The
conventional wisdom here is you throw the guy
under the bus. Oh, absolutely. Say he's crazy.
Say you barely knew him and move on. Cut the
anchor. That's politics 101. Isolate the threat.
Yep. But Obama does something much, much riskier.
He condemns the remarks. He calls them incendiary
and a distorted view of the country. But then
he says, I can no more disown him than I can
disown the black community. And this is the part
that I think really just stopped people in their
tracks. He creates this parallel. He compares
Jeremiah Wright to his own white grandmother.
This is the moment of rhetorical brilliance and
extreme risk. He brings up Madeleine Dunham.
The woman who raised him. The woman who sacrificed
everything for him. And he admits on national
television that this woman he loved once confessed
she was scared of black men passing her on the
street. He admitted she used racial stereotypes
that made him cringe. Yeah. So think about what
he's asking the listener to do. He's saying,
look, I have a white grandmother who has prejudices,
but I love her. I have a black pastor who has
this anger, but I love him. They are both messy,
imperfect parts of my life. And they are both
parts of America. It just completely neutralizes
the monster narrative. Right. By comparing right
to his grandmother, he's basically saying we
all have family members who say things at Thanksgiving
that make us uncomfortable, but we don't kick
them out of the family. Precisely. It forced
white voters specifically to think about their
own families rather than just judging Obama's.
It shifted the whole lens from is Obama a radical
to something more like how do we deal with the
complexities of the people we love? But he didn't
stop at just. People are complex. He actually
tries to explain why Wright was so angry. This
is where he kind of puts on the professor hat.
He does. He contextualizes the anger. He argues
that you can't understand Jeremiah Wright without
understanding the Jim Crow South. He talked about
the bitterness and bias of a generation that
suffered real legal humiliation. He made the
point that for that generation, the anger isn't
just made up. It's a scar. Yes. He paraphrased
Faulkner. The past isn't dead and buried. In
fact, it isn't even past. He was telling white
America, look, what you hear in those sound bites,
that's the overflow of pain that usually stays
in the barbershop or at the kitchen table. You're
just seeing it spill out. So he validates the
black experience. But then, and I think this
is the part that maybe won him the election,
he pivots to white resentment and he doesn't
scold them. This is the section that always gets
overlooked. But it is the intellectual core of
the speech. He acknowledges that working class
white Americans are angry, too. Right. And instead
of just dismissing that anger as simple racism
or prejudice. Yeah. He validates the economic
roots of it. He brings up busing. He brings up
affirmative action. He says, essentially. I get
it. He says that when white workers hear about
affirmative action, they don't see historical
correction. They see their own hard work being
devalued. They see a zero sum game where they
feel like they're losing ground. That is a massive
departure for a Democrat in 2008. I mean, usually
the line is check your privilege. But Obama is
saying, no, your anxiety is real. Your economic
fear is legitimate. He called it a racial stalemate.
He argued that for years politicians have exploited
these divisions. He said we treat race as a spectacle.
We obsess over the O .J. Simpson trial or Katrina.
But we ignore the underlying structural rot.
Exactly. The rot that hurts both the black factory
worker and the white steel worker. So he's trying
to bind their fates together. He's saying. You
guys are fighting each other over crumbs while
corporate interests run away with the pie. That's
it. He's trying to create a class -based coalition
that transcends race. He's telling the white
voter, you have more in common with the black
man in the pew at Trinity United than you do
with the CEO closing your plant. So that's the
argument. But let's talk about the reception.
Because in 2008, the media landscape was changing.
This speech wasn't just on CNN. It went on YouTube.
And we have to remember what YouTube was in 2008.
It wasn't what it is now. Watching a 37 minute
video on a desktop computer was a commitment.
And yet it got 1 .2 million views in 24 hours.
Which for the time is basically a Super Bowl
audience for a political speech. It's insane.
It signaled a huge shift. People were bypassing
the cable news sound bites. They wanted the full
context. It allowed Obama to, you know, speak
to the electorate like adults. So his supporters
obviously loved it. Historic. But I want to look
at the critics because this was not a universal
slam dunk. Not at all. There was a very wide
spectrum of reaction on the support side. Sure,
you had people like Bill Richardson, the New
Mexico governor, who said the speech actually
clinched his endorsement. OK. But you also had
some shocking defenses from the right. Mike Huckabee.
I was reading about this and I did a complete
double take. Yeah. Mike Huckabee, a Republican
candidate, went on Morning Joe and defended Obama.
Wow. As a former pastor himself, Huckabee said,
look. Sermons are emotional. They're not scripted.
We need to cut people some slack who grew up
under Jim Crow. He basically told his own party
to back off. That is a level of nuance we don't
see much of these days. To put it mildly. But
then you had the real skeptics. Ed Koch, the
former NYC mayor, he wasn't buying it. He hated
the grandmother comparison. He felt it was a
deflection. And Charles Krauthammer, the conservative
columnist, he really went for the throat. Krauthammer
was brutal. He called the speech a brilliant
fraud. He thought it was an intellectual magic
trick. A magic trick. Yeah. His argument was
Obama gave us this whole history lesson on Jim
Crow to explain right, but he never answered
the personal question. Why did you, Barack Obama,
a man of the future, stay in a church stuck in
the past? Krauthammer called it a sophistic justification.
So you have one side calling it a master class
and the other calling it a brilliant fraud. But
in the end, the voters clearly broke toward Obama.
The polling showed it worked. A CBS poll found
69 % of voters thought he did a good job addressing
the issue. It didn't make the right controversy
disappear, of course. No, the Republicans used
it all the way to November. They did. But it
stopped the panic. It neutralized that Manchurian
candidate. Fear for enough independence to keep
the campaign alive. I want to end on the story
he used to close the speech, because for all
the talk of the Constitution and Jim Crow, he
ends with this really small, intimate story.
The story of Ashley Baia. This is the emotional
hook. Yeah. He couldn't end on policy. He had
to end on feeling. Ashley Baia was a young white
campaign organizer in South Carolina. Right.
She's organizing a community meeting, and she
shared her story that her mom had struggled with
cancer and bankruptcy, and she wanted to fix
the system. And at the same meeting, there's
an elderly black volunteer. Right. An older black
man who sees Ashley, this young white woman,
trying to hold together. He tells everyone in
the room to listen to her. And the quote Obama
uses is that this man says, I am here because
of Ashley. It's the goosebumps moment. You have
the young white organizer and the old black volunteer
realizing their struggles, health care, poverty,
insecurity are actually the same struggle. And
Obama describes the scene. Ashley handing out
mustard and relish sandwiches. It just grounds
these high ideals of the Constitution in the
reality of a community center in South Carolina.
It was his way of saying this union becomes more
perfect, not in the halls of Congress, but right
here between these two people. It's a powerful
narrative. It is. But looking back on it now,
it does raise a question. The speech was titled
A More Perfect Union. Do we feel like the speech
actually moved the needle on race or was it just
a brilliant survival tactic? That is the enduring
debate, isn't it? Academics compared to JFK's
speech on religion or Lincoln at Cooper Union.
These moments where a candidate turns a liability
into an asset. The New Yorker argued that this
speech is the reason he became president. But
there's a but. But critics would argue that while
it got him elected, the racial stalemate he described
didn't break. In fact, you could argue the backlash
to his presidency proved just how deep that stalemate
really was. So was it a moment of genuine teaching
or was it just the most effective political magic
trick of the modern era? You know, it's possible
that in the landscape of American politics to
survive, it had to be both. He had to teach us
just enough to get us to vote for him. But maybe
one speech couldn't fix the underlying crack
in the foundation. It's a speech that really
demands a reread, especially now. The rhetoric
holds up even if that, you know, post -racial
optimism feels a little distant. Absolutely.
It's a document of a very specific moment where
we dared to hope that talking like adults might
actually solve the problem. If you haven't read
the full text or watched that 37 -minute video,
it is really worth your time, especially that
Ashley Baez story at the end. it lands it really
does thanks for joining us on this deep dive
we'll see you next time