Barack Obama and the Blessing of America

Anne Lieberman had a trenchant observation immediately after Barack Obama’s speech yesterday: 

At the end of the speech, Mr. Obama missed a very important opportunity that was staring him in the face. At the end of his speech, he could so easily have said, "Thank you. And G-d Bless America."

I held my breath, but he didn’t say it. He only said, "Thank you."

Had he chosen to say, "G-d Bless America," it wouldn’t have erased my memory of his pastor screaming "G-d DAMN America!" from the pulpit, but it would have helped.

Anne’s observation reminded me of Mark Steyn’s comment in his column last week about Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s refusal to sing “God Bless America”:

The song the Rev. Wright won’t sing is by Irving Berlin . . . . Berlin was a Jew, and he suffered slights: He grew up in the poverty of New York‘s Lower East Side. When he made his name and fortune, his marriage to a Park Avenue heiress resulted in her expulsion from the Social Register. In the Thirties, her sister moved in with a Nazi diplomat and proudly flaunted her diamond swastika to Irving. But Berlin spent his infancy in Temun, Siberia (until the Cossacks rode in and razed his village), and he understood the great gift he’d been given:  "God Bless America, Land that I love." . . .

I understand the Ellis Island experience of Russian Jews was denied to blacks. But not to Obama. His experience surely isn’t so different to Berlin‘s — except that Barack got to go to Harvard.

Obama’s life is a testament to the blessing of America (although he is not the first black American with a serious chance to win the presidency — that would have been Colin Powell, two decades ago, had he not declined to run). 

But Obama apparently could not bring himself to end his speech with the words that would have been a direct repudiation of his spiritual adviser.  His campaign’s myth is that he will bring us all together — those who damn America and those who bless it.  It’s his shtick and he’s sticking to it.