Today, Barack Obama spoke to the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) in Washington D.C. His topic once again: pooled misery.
Apparently the day’s theme was “diversity in government,” so Obama spoke about his own cheery conception of American diversity. For Obama, diversity means we’re all behind the same eight-ball:
It’s about making sure that we have a government that knows that a problem facing any American is a problem facing all Americans.
It’s about making sure our government knows that when there’s a Hispanic girl stuck in a crumbling school who graduates without learning to read or doesn’t graduate at all, that isn’t just a Hispanic-American problem, that’s an American problem.
When Hispanics lose their jobs faster than almost anybody else, or work jobs that pay less, and come with fewer benefits than almost anybody else, that isn’t a Hispanic-American problem, that’s an American problem.
When 12 million people live in hiding in this country and hundreds of thousands of people cross our borders illegally each year; when companies hire undocumented workers instead of legal citizens to avoid paying overtime or to avoid a union; and a nursing mother is torn away from her baby by an immigration raid, that is a problem that all of us – black, white, and brown – must solve as one nation.
If Bill Clinton felt your pain, Barack Obama runs a full service agony emporium. First he helps you identify the ache, then he feels it, then he lets you trade notes with other sufferers, then he grafts your pain onto theirs before blaming the whole harrowing orgy on George W. Bush and John McCain. When the misery is about to engulf you, he offers relief in the form of his own autobiographical morality tale.
And it’s why I first moved to Chicago after college. As some of you know, I turned down more lucrative jobs and went to work for a group of churches so I could help turn around neighborhoods that were devastated when the local steel plants closed. I knew that change in those communities would not come easy. But I also knew that it wouldn’t come at all if we didn’t bring people together. So I reached out to community leaders – black, brown, and white – and built a coalition on issues from failing schools to illegal dumping to unimmunized children. Together, we gave job training to the jobless, helped prevent students from dropping out of school, and taught people to stand up to their government when it wasn’t standing up for them.
It was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life – because it showed me that what holds this country together is that fundamental belief that we all have a stake in each other; that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper; and in this country, we rise and fall together.
This is the kind of pitch-perfect prepared hodgepodge of populist promises that he can give in his sleep. He repeatedly hit on immigration reform, of course, and in fairness, John McCain made the same sweeping promises to the same organization. The question with Obama is: will the next few days see him backing down from one of today’s pledges because it offended another segment of his aggrieved base? Stay tuned.
