A discourse of division

Obama’s speech was one of the best — and most frank — political speeches in recent memory. It was deep in many respects: race, class, and religion being the most noticeable. I was particularly struck by one passage on our political discourse though:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies. We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.”

For those of you keeping track, that’s the second critique of cable news in two days. Today, Obama called on us to reject the political discourse of “division, and conflict, and cynicism” as propagated by cable news. Let me reboot a comparable quote from yesterday’s Pew study:

When it came to specific stories, cable news showed a tendency to take the biggest stories of the year and make them bigger, particularly stories that lent themselves to argument, predictions and political divide.