HOW IT STARTED:
Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America – there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
— Sen. Obama’s Keynote Address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
—The London Daily Mail, yesterday.
As Neo wrote in 2015 in her look back at the 2004 speech by Joe’s boss:
Reading it now I could almost weep, because it is so deceptive, so unlike the Barack Obama we’ve come to know so well. If the guy portrayed in that speech had won an election, the result probably wouldn’t have been half bad. But that guy never existed; he was an actor reading his lines. 2004 was his first performance on the national stage, and he ought to have won an Oscar for it.
Even the actor himself later fessed up that he was giving a heck of a performance:
In the speech that made his name in 2004, Illinois state senator Barack Obama jubilantly told the Democratic National Convention in Boston, “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America, there’s the United States of America.” On April 24, 2017, reflecting on the earlier speech, Obama said, “That was aspirational,” to widespread laughs. He added, “Honestly it’s not true when it comes to our politics.”
—Kyle Smith, “Obama’s Book of Balderdash,” his review of We Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama, edited by Obama sycophants E. J. Dionne Jr. and Joy-Ann Reid, National Review, June 12th 2017 issue. (Subscription required.)