And you're wrong about the impact of this on Obama: it's all positive. But, instead of getting angry, I direct you to a true tour de force, Jesse Jackson's 1984 convention speech, which was doubtless a major source of inspiration to a 23-year-old kid named Barack Obama:
<...No generation can choose the age or circumstance in which it is born, but through leadership it can choose to make the age in which it is born an age of enlightenment, an age of jobs, and peace, and justice. Only leadership -- that intangible combination of gifts, the discipline, information, circumstance, courage, timing, will and divine inspiration -- can lead us out of the crisis in which we find ourselves. Leadership can mitigate the misery of our nation. Leadership can part the waters and lead our nation in the direction of the Promised Land. Leadership can lift the boats stuck at the bottom.>
<...We are bound by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Heschel, crying out from their graves for us to reach common ground. We are bound by shared blood and shared sacrifices. We are much too intelligent, much too bound by our Judeo-Christian heritage, much too victimized by racism, sexism, militarism, and anti-Semitism, much too threatened as historical scapegoats to go on divided one from another. We must turn from finger pointing to clasped hands. We must share our burdens and our joys with each other once again. We must turn to each other and not on each other and choose higher ground.>
<...We must be unusually committed and caring as we expand our family to include new members. All of us must be tolerant and understanding as the fears and anxieties of the rejected and the party leadership express themselves in many different ways. Too often what we call hate -- as if it were some deeply-rooted philosophy or strategy -- is simply ignorance, anxiety, paranoia, fear, and insecurity. To be strong leaders, we must be long-suffering as we seek to right the wrongs of our Party and our nation. We must expand our Party, heal our Party, and unify our Party. That is our mission in 1984.>
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jessejackson1984dnc.htm1984 Democratic National Convention Speech (comment)
<In this July 17, 1984 speech in San Francisco, Jesse Jackson sought to heal the division created by his Presidential candidacy and pledged to support the candidacy of Walter Mondale. (Jackson had won almost 400 delegates, finishing behind Mondale and Gary Hart).
Starting at 11 p.m., and for the next fifty minutes (with more television viewers watching than at any time in the convention), Jackson seemed to turn the convention hall into a great revival tent. Successive roars of applause kept swelling over the audience as Jackson's gospel-cadenced, impassioned oration galvanized his audience in the name of party unity.
Throughout it, the television audience kept increasing--reaching 33 million viewers by the end. Many compared the speech to one of the greatest ever delivered at a nominating convention. "If you are a human being and weren't affected by what you just heard, you may be beyond redemption," declared Florida Governor Bob Graham.>
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/jesse/speeches/index.html
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