The Derb observes that Barak Obama is "articulate." The man went to Harvard Law School and Oxford, of course he's articulate.
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What a Nice Man! And So Well-Spoken!
22 Oct 2006 03:51 pm
Comments (45)
Not all graduates of Harvard and Yale can string coherent sentences together.
I could be wrong, but I don't remember reading about a stint at Oxford in any Obama bios. Columbia, Harvard Law, and then a teaching job at Chicago. Oxford...?
This is where that Chris Rock joke about Colin Powell belongs.
right, but the particular Yale undergrad you're referring to was most definitely rejected by Harvard Law. And Yale Law, too.
I mean, you're right that fancy degrees are not in general a guarantee that their possessor is articulate. But given the odds, it is more surprising when someone with that pedigree is an inarticulate moron, as Bush is, than when they are relatively well-spoken, as Obama is.
So the question remains: would Derb have found it noteworthy to be *surprised* at an articulate Oxonian Harvard JD, if Obama had been of Derb's color? MY's betting 'no', and so would I.
Not to mention that his first book - I haven't read the new one - is a fantastic, powerfully written memoir about how he decided and learned to become a member of the African American community (from his upbringing as a half-Kenyan raised by a white Kansan mother in Hawaii and Indonesia), a book that would be worth reading if he'd never attracted attention for anything else.
Articulate, fine. Can we at least all admit that he's jug-eared, and good-looking only by political ("Hollywood for ugly people") standards?
Nice try Matt...George Bush went to Yale and Harvard..and not even the staunchest Republican would claim he is articulate..
I think he's got that Jimmy Stewart thing going on. He's got a similar gawky charm. Mr Obama goes to Washington!
Agree w/ Kumar - Derb's comment was nowhere near Chris Rock territory - "I take CARE of my kids..."
Although I'll gladly wager that some inarticulate folks have gone to Harvard Law, I'll bet none of them have ever run the Law Review.
Shockingly, people sometimes even refer to white politicians as "articulate." I googled "John Edwards articulate" and "Howard Dean articulate" and easily found examples quotes.
So you might be right about what you're implying here, but I think we should give people (even the Derb) the benefit of the doubt. Playing "gotcha" like this doesn't really help the national dialogue.
Am I the only person who thinks Obama's not that good-looking? People aren't supposed to have blue lips unless they're freezing to death.
Lord. "Articulate" is indeed code for "doesn't SOUND like a n----r." Used to hear that all the time, until even in Mississippi it sounded too blatant.
I don't know whether The Derb's "articulate" remark was code for a nastier thought or not. Knowing the derb's pervious work, I woukdn't doubt it. But I find this prospect of projecting racism onto anyone describing black people as articulate or well spoken, especially when said people have a reputation for adept speech & oratory, to be absurd & perverse. Barack Obama IS articulate AND well spoken, and that has nothing to do with the fact that he went to Harvard. I've known plenty of other people with comparable amounts of melanin who were also articulate & well spoken, whom never attended such prestigious institutions. George W. Bush, a man who did, is neither articulate nor well spoken.
There are plenty of very smart, very well-educated lawyers who aren't very good public speakers. They go into real estate or tax or whatever.
That said, there's certainly no good reason why anyone would take the trouble to point out that the former president of the Harvard Law Review is well spoken. You might as well point out that an NBA player is tall. Some NBA players are short, but there's no reason why you'd be surprised that a particular player was tall, or that a particular Harvard Law grad was well spoken. Derb probably found it surprising for some other reason. Hmm.
The "articulate" comment is also a pretty damnable understatement. Obama's isn't just well spoken, he's one of the five best public speakers in all of American politics. It's insulting with faint praise.
Obama's definitely weird looking, I agree with that.
ed,
The basic divide here IMO is that many people, myself included, not longer feel that "helping the national dialog" is a worthy goal. Would you have chided vocal opponents of Hitler in 1934 for not helping the national dialog? I think not. Oh, gee, I guess according to Godwin's law I've now lost the argument. Except that IMO after the passage of the 2006 torture and dictatorship law, Goodwin's law is no longer operative.
Now, it may help us in certain venues to pretend that the thugs in the republican establishment, and their enablers, are other than monsters, but in a place like this, let's call them as we see them. Derb is a worthless excuse for a human being; racism is only one of his many faults. I have no desire to be fair to him, and I am more than happy to see people take cheap shots at him. Rhetorical or otherwise.
Not that I think that MY's post was a cheap shot, but just for the sake of argument.
Tangentially related: anybody who would actually decide to run for president with less than two years' worth of real political experience is a complete tool. Don't become a complete tool, senator.
Christmas seems right to me. Obama can take a Veep spot if it's offered, but he'd be mad to run himself in 2008.
Extraordinary for a negro, and almost handsome too!
So the question remains: would Derb have found it noteworthy to be *surprised* at an articulate Oxonian Harvard JD, if Obama had been of Derb's color?
How does anybody read into Derb's remarks that he was "surprised" at Obama's articulateness? Simply acknowledging an observation doesn't imply that one is surprised by it. Obama is now a self-acknowledged presidential aspirant. Talking about the differing levels of articulateness of would-be commanders-in-chief is a perfectly non-noteworthy activity. It's part of the handicapping of the horse race. People often comment disparagingly about George W. Bush's lack of articulateness. I never hear a trace of irony, though, because on Bush's race (as in, gee, you'd think a Yale and HBS-educated WASP would be a more effective speaker). It should be the same with Obama. Cut the Derb some slack. His was a perfectly innocuous comment. It seems like liberals like Yglesias are truly the ones obsessed with race.
Turtle was a submarine invented in 1775 by David Bushnell, created as a means of attaching explosive charges to ships in a harbor. Named for its shape, Turtle was 7.5 feet (2.3 m) long, 6 feet (1.8 m) tall, and about 3 feet (0.9 m) wide, consisting of two wooden shells covered with tar. It submerged by allowing water into the hull and ascended by pushing water out through a hand pump, similarly to the use of ballast tanks in modern submarines, and was propelled vertically and horizontally by hand-cranked propellers, the first recorded use of the screw propeller for ships. It was manned and operated by only one person.
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On September 7, 1776, under the guidance of Army volunteer Sergeant Ezra Lee, the American Turtle attacked the British HMS Eagle, which was moored off what is today called Liberty Island.
OCTOBER 2006
On a warm Friday afternoon last May, Alex Halderman double-parked his Cadillac STS near a New York hotel, left the motor idling and ducked into an alley for a secret rendezvous. Moments later, the Princeton University grad student emerged with a black attaché case containing what he feared was a grave threat to the United States: A Diebold AccuVote-TS electronic voting machine.
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Now they have shown -- on the Internet, in Congress, and for anyone else who will watch -- how easily a popular electronic voting machine, long off-limits to public examination, can be rigged to steal elections without leaving any electronic fingerprints.
Six years after Florida's hanging chad debacle, nearly 40 percent of the American electorate will cast ballots next month on electronic voting machines, many of them bought with $3 billion provided by Congress for technology upgrades.
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But state lawmakers were sufficiently concerned about machines produced by Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, Calif., and used in 19 of 21 counties, to require paper receipts as a backup by January 2008. "Any electronic voting machine without a voter-verifiable paper trail has the potential for enormous abuse," says computer security consultant Bruce Schneier. He served on a New York University task force that in June reported "significant security and reliability vulnerabilities" in electronic voting systems.
Diebold won't let the Princeton team peer under the hood of its newer AccuVote-TSx. And Sequoia has thus far resisted such calls. "Our voting technology is proprietary, and that is something the company needs to be protective of. That's our asset, that's our business," said Sequoia spokeswoman Michelle Shafer.
The "asset" and "business" of Diebold and Sequoia is nothing less than the direct subversion of American Democracy, our very Nation itself, through criminal and entirely unconscionable vote fraud. Alex Halderman, Ari Feldman, and Princeton Professor Ed Felten are true American Patriots in direct line of succession to the courageous, honorable, and revered American Revolutionary Veterans David and Ezera Bushnell, Benjamin Franklin, and Army Volunteer Seargent Ezra Lee.
This raises an interesting problem for anyone who wants Obama (or any other black person) to be the Dem candidate in the next election. People are sick of having a stumbler like Bush for president, so if you've got a well-spoken candidate, you want to be able to point that out and get people thinking about it when they weigh their options. But you can't do that if Obama's the candidate, because even mentioning that Obama (or any black person) is articulate makes you sound like a racist.
He has a difficult time in the pocket too, because instictually he often relies on his athleticism.
The man went to Harvard Law School and Oxford, of course he's articulate.
Geez, why in the world would you think that going to Harvard and Oxford makes one articulate? That's like saying "the man is a Harvard grad; of course he's a good speller." Which would be, you know, disproven here every day.
BTW, you need a semi-colon in that sentence; the comma doesn't work.
I think it's time to IP-ban our founding fathers.
Small wonder that Derb would be suprised that Obama went to Oxford, so would Obama and many Oxford graduates like myself.
Oxford is probably the worlds most politically aware University. If Obama had so much as attended a lecture the event would have been noted.
There is no note of Oxford in Obama's biographies.
Whenever people point out that some black political figure is articulate, the chances are they are actually correct. Think about it: Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Obama, Colin Powell. These actually are some of the best speakers of their generation. No matter your thoughts on Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, they all have a lot more charisma than most politically active people you see on TV and can actually write interesting speaches with clever turns of phrases. Part of the reason they do is that the likes of King, Sharpton and Jackson are/were all ministers in black churches, where the standards have often higher than in their white counterparts. The biggest reason probably is that to be black and seen a lot on TV and rise high, you have to be better than just about everyone around you. A black Hastert could never have been elected to the House, never mind become speaker, in part because of his lack of charisma. The combination of being black and inarticulate would just kill just about any candidacy for anything national. A black pol or figure who has to appeal to white America simply has to be among the best of his generation. Average a la Frist simply won't do, but a white Frist can coast on mediocrity into power.
There is no note of Oxford in Obama's biographies.
According to Wikipedia, Obama attended Occidental College, before transferring to Columbia (where he got his undergrad degree). Maybe Matthew mixed up Oxford and Occidental?
More interesting, to me, is that he graduated from Punahou. Fascinating!
I think Matthew may be confusing Obama with Cory Booker, who went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and then went to Yale Law School.
The beauty of MY's various spelling and writing idiosyncracies is that they provide plausibel deniability for all sorts of possible confusions.
I think Matthew may be confusing Obama with Cory Booker, who went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and then went to Yale Law School.
That's really too, too perfect. Advantage, Derb.
It's possible that Derbyshire refers to Obama's ability, much-vaunted by observers when he originally ran for the Democratic senatorial nomination, to be communicative and persuasive to people who don't already share his mindset, worldview, education, etc. I think that probably, if locked him in a room with a lifelong Republican for 15 minutes, Obama has a better chance of persuading the Republican to switch teams than most Democratic senators.
Alan Keyes is also articulate in his way, but no one who isn't already a Keyesian is persuaded by him. That's one reason (admittedly, among very, very many) why Obama beat Keyes a bajilliondy to one.
Besides, what country has every gone wrong hiring University of Chicago-affiliated academics to run its government?
I feel sick and dizzy.
Why?
Because I'm actually siding with Derb on this one (our shared admiration of buxom teens non-withstanding). Here's the thing, Matt: Obama is extraordinarily articulate. Regardless of color (since you're obviously implying Derb's comment was racially motivated). In fact, I would say Obama's silver-tongued smoothness with the spoken word is his most noteable characteristic...again, regardless of race. It is what distinguishes him from all the other milktoast, generic Demcrats out there. In fact, I think it's fair to say that this is the ONE obvious thing everyone notices about Obama. So Derb was mentioning the obvious - that Obama's speaking ability is noticeable - which isn't a sin last I checked.
Count me as someone who believes that great politicians are born, not made, and will succeed regardless of the prevailing policitical environment -- based on their god-given ability. Thus, Bill Clinton would succeed as a politician, regardless of whether Washington is divided by bitter, partisan strife...or Republicans and Democrats are holding hands and singing kumbayah. Why? Because he is a gifted politician. The same went for Dubbya, who showed himself to be a brilliant compaigner before the reality of his governing skills became too apparent to ignore.
And this is why I'm not buying the whole "Obama sucks because he talks about bipartisanship" meme that's coming out of the liberal blogosphere. Yes, rank and file Democrats must fight Republicans on every issue, to the death, as a rule. It's the only way they will win. If Obama is a politician on the scale of Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, however, the rules don't apply. After all, what are politicians if they are not salesmen?
If Obama is a great politician, he can easily sell bipartisanship and class -- and he can win with it. For the truly gifted, politics is about personality and persuasiveness, not tactics or even policy positions. I'm not saying Obama is a great politician. But his ability to speak is noticeable. He exudes a kind of serious thoughtfulness that seems to set him apart from the "ordinary politician." Will this sell on a national stage? I'm not sure. But I know this: anytime a candidate is a gifted speaker, a little lattitude is in order. The blogosphere should consider the possibility that Obama is uniquely talented enough to make a classy, bipartisan authenticity sell in our cultural wasteland.
Hell, McCain makes it work and he's full of shit. Why can't Obama? Especially if he's genuine? Talent is talent is talent. Liberals should give it a chance.
owenz, I see what you are saying but...no. If Derb were talking about a white man he wouldn't have said 'articulate.'
jhudson,
Perhaps. But that doesn't change the fact that Obama is stunningly...articulate.
John Kerry? Not articulate. George W. Bush? Not articulate. Barak Obama? Articulate in the way only former Editors-and-Chief of the Harvard Law Review are articulate.
Look, if Obama runs for president, there will be PLENTY of racially-tinged rhetoric going around. And people like Derb will be all too happy to engage in round after round of bickering about identity politics, knowing that ANY argument that allows conservatives to suggest that Obama wants "special treatment" will play to the base and hurt Barak's chances in the long run.
If the phrase "tar baby" makes an appearance, then by all means, let's fight back. But freaking out because a paleoconservative like John Derbyshire calls an exceptionally articulate black guy "articulate" hurts more than it helps.
'Articulate' is very faint praise, hardly praise at all - implies merely that someone has basic competence in uttering words and sentences. Why would that be remarkable? Would you call Bill Clinton 'articulate'?
Words that might imply an appreciation of Obama's skills are for example 'eloquent', 'outspoken', 'persuasive'... which maybe Derb could not bring himself to type.
I have to agree with Mr. Dent, there. Derbyshire's usage isn't the end of the world, but articulate is a stupid word to use for someone who's well beyond articulate.
Not that Derb couldn't bring himself to type, Mr. Dent...It is this very fact that shines the light of backhanded racism on Derb's comment. Articulate is what you say when you mean a black person that "sounds white". Eloquent, outspoken and persuasive are words you use to describe someone (regardless of color) who has Mr. Obama's evident rhetorical skills (although 'outspoken' dances along the 'uppity' tightrope). Derb chose his words carefully and precisely...neither blacks nor his intended audience have any question of his meaning.
are/were all ministers in black churches, where the standards have often higher than in their white counterparts
Pardon the over-generalization that I hope will not be taken as a sign of prejudice, but the standards at Black churches do indeed seem higher. I dunno if anybody's actually done a study on this, but unless it's my imagination, the ministers of Black churches seem to be far more likely to have doctoral degrees (and in general to be better educated) than other clergy.
I'm sure, if this is indeed the case, there are many reasons why, but it is something interesting to note ...
I'm suspicious of derbyshire's motives here too, but what about going to Oxford and Harvard Law makes you articulate? Neither school requires an oral exam for admission, afaik. I'm shy and stutter, and I got into Harvard Law just fine.
I think the Pres of the HLR is an elected post, but you have to be on the Review to be elegible, no? But not always so articulate. Ever checked out Susan Estrich, former Dukakis for Pres. campaign director, when she is/was on a political rant as a commentator on Fox? She was President of the Harvard Law Review. How about FTC lawyer fresh out of HLS and friend of Charles Van Doren, then asst. sec of state for latin America under JFK at 29,political speechwriter for RFK, professor, writer, and playwright, Richard Goodwin, now known as the husband of Doris Kearns Goodwin. I think being close to JFK and RFK and living through their assassinations affected him deeply and maybe soured him on public life. I am informed by one of his classmates, a former appellate judge in Florida, that Goodwin was the smartest guy in his class (you know, among other talents, the guy who in the first week of his first year can answer all of the questions the prof asks and more, and you wonder, in awe, where he came from, or if he is not reviewing the course)that also included the now frowned upon Ralph Nader.
The low expectations of soft bigotry.
Obama's articulateness is tied to Novak's criticsm (which Derb endorses) that Obama doesn't have a sense of humor.
Lack of a sense of humor is only a fault among the arrogant, and Obama comes across as very down to earth. In politics, a sense of humor only gets you in trouble. One, half the population has a double digit IQ so its hard enough to make a sincere point. If you're trying to be funny, you're likely to sail way over the heads of a lot of people. Two, humor in politics comes across as sarcasm-- Bob Dole would have been more likeable if he wasn't always ready with the snide putdown.
Frankly, the lack of humor in a politician usually means they're good at message discipline-- the smartest thing a politician can "say" is to not articulate every thought they have. John Edwards bored political reporters to tears by never going off message. But guess what? Unlike Kerry, he never said anything that could be turned into a GOP attack ad. Obama seems to have the same message discipline which is damn important for a presidential race.
Comments closed November 05, 2006.
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Heads in the Sand
I take it the Derb never saw Undercover Brother, or if he did just fast-forwarded to the Denise Richards- Aunjanue Ellis catfight, lamenting bitterly how much sexier it would be if both actresses were underage?
Posted by Feathers McGraw | October 22, 2006 4:00 PM