Painting His Masterpiece

++Rachel Maddow is to be commended for her showing President Obama's eulogy in Charleston, South Carolina, without commercial break on MSNBC. 

++It is worth seeing again as early returns are in that this was President Obama's greatest speech as President. In fact, it is said that no American President could have given this speech, except our first black President, both speaking to the black community and for America as whole. 

++James Fellows has an excellent article in the Atlantic analyzing the structure of the speech and how  President Obama brilliantly used "amazing grace" as his unifying theme and how the President changed registers from who the "we" were throughout the speech. 

++It is said that President Obama could not have given this speech anytime in his presidency until now.  In his second term,having endured the painful sequences of mass shootings and police killings of unarmed blacks,he frankly looked and sounded beat, frustrated and tired. Earlier articles said he sounded defeated from the orgy of gun violence. As he said he meditated on the idea of having "an open heart" and how that would make up for any failure in policy prescriptions. From that he drew the inspiration of his speech where he too was humbled. 

++The speech itself was a masterpiece. Not my favorite Obama speech but the one that would resound longer and live longer than any he has given.

++His Selma speech was also a masterpiece where criticized for having a different vision of America, he outlined his idea of "American exceptionalism" and invoked the "better angels" of the Republic.

++I thought his eulogy of Pastor Pinckney invoked the hard harshness of American and black life. It was realistic in its approach to today's America but reserved its hope in being granted God's "amazing grace". 

++In a strange way,it was an elaboration of the second half of James Winthrop's "Shining City on the Hill" speech which invoked the hard times America would face if it did not live up to its ideals. 

++I have always cringed at President Obama's invocation of Christian themes but in this setting in oldest black church in the South, which once had been burned down because it pastor wanted to eliminate slavery, it was fitting and President Obama clearly felt at home in the black church. Gone was Mr. No Drama Obama and Enter Preacher Obama. 

++James fellows reminds us that rhetoric has a structure and that Obama's eulogy was a brilliant use of that structure. Like Martin Luther King,his religious rhetoric also was many to invoke a shared sense of humanity in the audience.