I just, finally, watched Barack Obama’s March 18th speech on race. Ridiculous that it took me this long, but there you go. It’s an impressive and important speech, and yet more evidence that he’s the most astute, thoughtful, and invigorating candidate out there — in a field of candidates and recently ex-candidates that I’m quite impressed by: Clinton, Edwards, even McCain. (Have I mentioned I’m an Obama supporter? There you go.)

I think it was the mark of a leader, more than a politician, that he responded to the furor over his pastor Jeremiah Wright’s militant rhetoric and Geraldine Ferraro’s abrasive comments as he did, by opening up the messiness and complexity of race in America rather than skirting the topic. Its an issue that, no matter how old, and no matter how improved since decades past, nevertheless persists, and will long persist. It is a problem deep and subtle enough that, when we think we have addressed some fundamental rift, we must look for the new and more subtle way it remains.

But it also strikes me that I wish he also had taken another tack, one not about race but about intellectual independence. Its one thing for people to call for Obama to condemn some of the more outlandish statements made by Wright, which he did. But others are saying that he should have disassociated himself from Wright’s churhc as soon as some of these perspectives were expressed. I can’t help but think that this assertion, that one must distance oneself from everyone who you substantially disagree with, is exactly what’s wrong with our contemporary political landscape. It seems both foolish and devastatingly dangerous to surround oneself with those who perfectly share your perspective — its the road to being blinded by the seemingly impeccable logic of your own ideology. I’d much rather have a leader that is determined to speak to those who disagree with him, to understand other sides of the argument, to force themselves to think bigger than they already do. And, I expect that our leader will have the intellectual fortitude to encounter such perspectives and yet also withstand them - to understand them, to think more clearly about their own position from the encounter, maybe to learn from them; to be open to being persuaded if the other perspective is compelling, but not to fall under the sway of some argument just because it is made with style and flourish. I wished Obama had also said that; that he is certainly capable of listening to someone like Wright, to take strength from the good things he said, to be thoughtful but critical of those claims that were corrosive, and to be smarter about race and politics and strife and progress because of it. That, in fact, we want a leader who dares to encounter those who think differently, rather than those who flee from and caricature them.

I appreciate, historically, that we still worry about the persuasive power of leaders who can convince their people to go down a path they do not believe in; the twentieth century was rife with them. But I think we worry too little about the opposite problem. We are much more prone to feeling confirmed by those who agree with us than we are to fall sway to the demagoguery of those who do not. I wish we had a political culture that respected and cultivated debate, thoughtfulness, inquiry, and the intellectual independence necessary to benefit from that, than the kind of wagon-circling, managed group-think
that has been championed so persistently since 9/11.

In case you haven’t seen it: