A More Perfect Union

Today, we take a break from the daily bantering about me and my world to analyze Barack Obama's speech. Some of the media are dissecting it word by word saying he didn't do enough in denouncing his former pastor others are heralding it as historic.

Here are my thoughts.

As you know, I am a supporter of Obama's movement. I love that he is an architect of words, a thinker before a speaker, a listener, and most important, a uniting force.

That said, Obama's speech today, which I'm watching now on YouTube and read earlier today on Internet, moved me. Surprise, surprise, right?

Get this, I didn't totally agree with everything he said today, or think he said everything as best he could. It was wordy in some places, and unclear in others.

But here's why it moved me: it was earnest.

There is a brutal honesty found within this speech, a candidness you will find in the words of few other politicians. Obama worked both sides. He played every card the way Jimmy Rabbit did on stage in 8 Mile (bad analogy, I know). Barack told the nation about itself from the perspective of a embittered black man chastising whites for slavery and Jim Crow to the white working class despising blacks for affirmative action.

But he weaved his words and analogies all in the name of unity, the idea of perfecting our union in mind. Not making this country perfect, but striving for perfection understanding full well that we will fall short. He said he understand the impossibility and impracticality of curing all of the ills of the racial divide in this country during his time in office.

Yet in still, there's is a profoundness to a man who dare hope in the face of iniquity, a man who stands up at every turn and agrees or disagrees staunchly with his supporters and naysayers in moments of triumph and failure. This is what we, as a black people, have hoped for in Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan in so many ways. Someone to say something, that makes sense, in moments that matter, and be able to move a people.

But now we understand that he isn't going to agree with every black plight, as he has suggested by denouncing his former pastor's words. But Obama will call a spade a spade, whether it's white, black, Latino or Asian; whether it's rich or poor; corporate or union.

The thing he wants us to take from this tough, at least I believe, is to do what you do, and say what you say in the name of unity, in that name of perfected union. I could a write thesis on what the words perfection, perfected and perfect truly mean. They are loaded words.

But Obama is conveying that we should be striving for a perfected union, one that wants to provide a harmonious life for every child, woman, man and elder it possibly can, understanding that it can't.

That is this speech's purpose. It an attempt by Obama to make clear his purpose for running, and his true ambitions for America, to do the best things possible for the greatest number of Americans. The question is, Who are we to stop him or our own people?

And by people I mean Americans (and all watching superdelegates).