Firstly - if you have not seen Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention last week, here is a link to the full speech. It will be 45 of the most inspiring minutes of your life.

Now, on to the post…

Barack Obama is multi-racial and multi-cultural, son of an African father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas (Dorothy’s daughter who ran away to Oz and stayed there, because there was no place like home, no place better than Hawaii anyway). Obama has been socialized into many cultures - American, African, Indonesian, Hawaiian, Harvard Law, Black Chicagoan, lefty unionist, and elected officialdom, among others. And he has learned from each of these, learned to speak the language of each of these cultures, to see the world through the eyes of the Law Partner as well as the laid-off machinist, the single mom (like his own) and the soccer mom, the Black teen in the hood and the new immigrant and the Ivy Leaguer and the minor official, to sympathize and dream with each, and in so doing to demonstrate the shared experiences and needs that connect those of us who would otherwise feel divided, in so doing to replace enmity with compassion.

This we know. And those of us whose hearts are not too hardened by rejection, or corroded by media-fuelled cynicism, or poisoned by bigotry, welcome his willingness to dream, and to lead.

There are those who claim that he does not lead, that his words are empty rhetoric. Yet his words are truly the essence of his capacity to lead. His ability to speak truth to power, to listen to a multitude of voices and to distill their sighs and cries into his own, is the most powerful form of leadership that can be. Speaking as Obama does is leading by example.

In their collective blindness mainstream media suppose that leadership consists of something other than speaking and listening effectively and decisively. That it consists of something other than taking public responsibility for oneself and for others. That it consists of everything except this. But they are wrong. Everything follows from the stories we tell ourselves. Everything follows communication.

It was the power of communication (in this case the widely promoted lies about weapons of mass destruction) that got us into the the war in Iraq in the first place. Bush’s power was not divorced from the dishonesty that ruled in the mainstream media during the leadup to the invasion of Iraq. His actual power was his ability to create that climate of dishonest communication. Just as it was the power to influence communications in America that resulted in the popular support for the pre-war policy of depriving Iraq of medicine, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.

This is why Obama’s willingness to return the power of public speech to the citizens of America and the citizens of the world is so important, so transformative, and so powerful. “But,” some will say, “he is the one doing the talking, he is not returning anything to anybody. It is all about him.”

But here too they would be wrong. When, in his acceptance speech in Denver, Obama said: “What the naysayers don’t understand is that this election has never been about me. It is about you” he was not just spouting a clever turn-of-phrase. He was using some of that African knowledge that has shaped him. And what is the essence of that African knowledge? It is the knowledge that the individual who gets on stage to speak, to preach, to blow, is not there to speak to people but to be spoken through. That contrary to popular belief, call-and-response is not about the preacher calling and the congregation responding. It is about the congregation calling and the preacher responding. And what the community is calling for is healing. The true leader has an ego strong enough to carry and transmute that burden of need into a song of purpose and possibility, but humble enough to be responsive to the merest suggestion of need, and thus to be directed by the needs of the community that has called him/her into being. That is the power of the bluesman, of the jazz artist, and even some rappers, though sadly few MCs have the humility to heed the call.

So Barack Obama’s words are not ‘just words’. They are leadership incarnate. It is his ability to unite people through his words that will bring him to power. And it is that same ability that will yield tangible results once he is elected. Will they be the results he has promised? Perhaps not. He is admittedly setting the bar extremely high. And yet George Bush has set the bar so very low that we have nowhere to go but up.

Barack Obama is aiming for the stars because America desperately needs him to.