Barack Obama

Tonight while watch local news coverage of the MLK, Jr Dream speech various black activists were interviewed about their participation in the March. None referenced the roll back of the Voting Rights Act. This is one of the more blatant signs of the corporate influence in the media as I believe they cut away when the topic seemed within reach.

Then I saw Antoinette Tuff speak to Anderson Cooper. She is the personification of MLK's dream and the best of what being human is. She's a very proud President Obama supporter calling him the "greatest and the most needed in this time". I'll believe her on that because she is very tuned in to her God, lives a compassionate life, and is a quick thinker. So pleased to see her get some coverage on CNN in light of all that is going ignoring her in favor of more rage inducing racial division on FNC.

Then from the NYTimes:

August 21, 2013
Shaping a Speech, 50 Years After ‘I Have a Dream’
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

WASHINGTON — Talk about pressure.

Next week, President Obama will mark the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington with a speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, willingly putting himself in the very place where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered one of America’s greatest oratories five decades ago.

The split-screen comparisons are as inevitable as they are unwanted. A gifted orator himself, Mr. Obama nonetheless faces an unenviable task: to offer Americans a stirring, resonant moment that goes beyond his sometimes professorial remarks, without falling into a politically dangerous mimicry of Dr. King’s cadences and rhythms.

But the challenge has become something of a self-created one for Mr. Obama during his presidency. This summer, he presented himself at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin 50 years after President John F. Kennedy declared “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Last month, he chose the University of Cape Town in South Africa as the place for a speech to young people, just as Senator Robert F. Kennedy did a half century ago.

And in November, Mr. Obama has been invited to attend the 150th anniversary celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The president has not formally accepted yet. But if he finds himself on that battlefield, he will once again be speaking in the shadow of rhetorical genius.

“You don’t try to outdo the speech that was there,” said Jon Favreau, the president’s former top speechwriter, who left the White House this year. “You want the speech to say something new, to add to whatever was said before. Why is it relevant today? What can we learn from it in our time?”

Mr. Obama’s mere presence on the Lincoln Memorial platform on Wednesday will speak volumes: the election of the nation’s first black president serves as a testament to America’s sometimes halting progress toward what Dr. King that day envisioned as an “invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.”

But the president will not be able to leave it at that. He — and his speechwriters — will have to carefully choose words for Mr. Obama that stand on their own, a task made almost impossible by the ease with which the youngest of schoolchildren recite Dr. King’s most famous lines.

“It’s a hugely daunting challenge,” said Jeff Shesol, a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. “If you give some sort of wonky address on the economic agenda, I think it will sink like a stone. It will have to have some lift.”

Aides to Mr. Obama insist that the president, an assiduous student of history, is not dwelling on any comparisons that might be made between him and Dr. King, in large part because he sees it as foolish to try to match him.

“In moments like these, he’s cognizant of the historical importance of the moment he’s marking or the location where he’s speaking,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to the president. “He does not view this as some sort of competitive exercise.”

Mr. Obama’s current speechwriters declined to comment for this article. But Mr. Pfeiffer added, “What does not give us any pause is the idea that a bunch of pundits might say his speech wasn’t as good.” He mocked an observer in the news media who might suggest that “those were pretty good remarks, but they weren’t the Gettysburg Address.”

All presidents face rhetorical challenges at key moments in their tenure, but Mr. Obama has had more than his share of legends to live up to. His acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2008 happened to land on the 45th anniversary of Dr. King’s speech in Washington, five years ago next week.

Mr. Favreau recalled a debate among campaign advisers about how much Mr. Obama should talk about Dr. King in the acceptance speech that year. In the end, Mr. Obama made just a glancing reference to Dr. King and the anniversary.

“We went with a light touch,” Mr. Favreau recalled. He said in such moments, “you don’t have to be too self-conscious about it.”

Lincoln — whom Mr. Obama has repeatedly said he greatly admires — delivered just 272 words in the address at Gettysburg in November 1863. Lincoln predicted, famously and erroneously, that “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.” Former presidential speechwriters said Lincoln’s few words would make it even more difficult for Mr. Obama to find ones that feel fresh.

“I’d be pretty nervous as a speechwriter,” Mr. Shesol said. “It’s high-stakes speechwriting, no question.”

But because Lincoln’s address is so much less current than the one delivered by Dr. King, it presents the president with fewer speechmaking challenges, said Robert Schlesinger, the author of “White House Ghosts,” a book about modern presidents and their speechwriters.

“Gettysburg is pure history,” Mr. Schlesinger said. “In terms of living up to a moment, it’s tougher in the Martin Luther King instance, since people remember. You can’t go to YouTube and see Lincoln delivering his original address.”

Mr. Favreau said that his successors in the speechwriting office are sure to have reread Mr. King’s speech as preparation for Mr. Obama’s remarks next week. He said the president would typically go back and read the speech again, too.

They are words that Mr. Obama already knows well, Mr. Favreau said. In his 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama borrowed from Dr. King’s speech to help convey his impatience with the slow pace of change. He often paraphrased Dr. King’s comment that “we have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now.”

While declining to preview the president’s remarks ahead of next week’s event, Mr. Obama’s aides made one thing clear.

“Spoiler alert,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “It will be good, but it won’t be the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”