Obama’s your guy if…
An analysis of Barak Obama's Presidential Announcement

Sometimes it’s good to not see or even hear a speech by a politician and instead read the transcript. This is true especially when it is a carefully crafted speech such as Barak Hussein Obama’s announcement of his presidential candidacy. Reading the words without the bias of audio or visual stimulus allows one to consider the actual meaning and implications of what is said.

The Next Lincoln?
Obama’s message from Springfield, Illinois, on February 10, was certainly well crafted and his attempt to position himself as the modern-day Lincoln quite effective. He equates our time with Lincoln’s and senses a need for a “new birth of freedom” to ‘finish the work” that others started. He rightly senses a discontent with the political and even cultural status quo and is trying to tap that discontent by offering “a future of endless possibility” and a vision of “destiny calling.” And he presents this goal as reachable: all we must do is “shake off the slumber.”

He even alludes to his physical similarities to another “tall, gangly, self-made Springfield [IL] lawyer” who understood that there is “power in words… power in conviction… power in hope.”

If you believe this, then Obama's your guy
But what words does Obama support? What conviction does he stand on?
What hope does he profess? Let’s look at what Obama said in his
announcement:

If you believe we are engaged in “a war with no end,” in Iraq, then Obama’s your guy.

If you believe that most Americans are not “sharing in our prosperity,” that we must “allow our unions…to lift up this country’s middle class again,” that “every person” should [i.e. has a right to] be able to “earn a living wage” and “afford child care” while they work, then Obama’s your guy.

If you still believe in the failed New Deal “war on poverty” and all we need is a new leader to help us reach that goal (“Let’s be the generation the ends poverty in America”), then Obama’s your guy.

If you believe this should be the “generation” that says “we will have universal health care in American by the end of the next president’s first term,” then Obama’s your guy.

If you believe in the “crisis of global warming” and support a system for “capping greehouse gases,” then Obama’s your guy.

If you believe the issues of preserving marriage and immigration are merely straw men that have caused us to be “distracted from our real failures,” then Obama’s your guy.

If you believe “dependence on oil… threatens our future” and we need to be free “from the tyranny of oil” through “alternative fuels like ethanol and… more fuel efficient cars” (of course, no mention of nuclear), then Obama’s your guy.

Most of all if you believe “all of this cannot come to pass until we bring an end to this war in Iraq,” which Obama “opposed from the start,” which he calls a “tragic mistake,” and you believe it’s time to cut and run and “bring our combat troops home by March of 2008,” then Barak Hussein Obama’s definitely your guy.

Transcript of Obama’s speech here.