Charlie Pierce: The Best Speech in Iowa Didn't Come From Hillary or Bernie
—The Story County Democratic Party held its annual fall BBQ in a livestock arena on the campus of Iowa State University on Sunday afternoon. (This is why we have land-grant colleges in this country. Well, this, and really good college football.) Two of the three Democratic presidential candidates—Hillary Rodham Clinton and Martin O'Malley—dropped by to speak to the assembled burghers, who were dining on pulled pork and smoked meats. The campaign of Bernie Sanders sent a surrogate. His name was Cornel West.
Now, there are endless days on the campaign trail where absolutely nothing happens. You hear someone give the same speech in four or five different town squares. You see otherwise dignified people in handsome suits stumbling over cables and smaller livestock, which is funny the first seven or eight times you see it. But, after a while, you realize what you're watching is pretty much the news equivalent of meat slurry. And when you consider what the stakes are in what you're watching, the sheer travelling banality of the process can be both frightening and disheartening. But, every now and then, you get an afternoon like Sunday afternoon, in the most unlikely place, where the process serves you up the real thing.
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Suddenly, the whole atmosphere of the day changed. Some of the people who'd stuck around looked on in something like awe. Some of them laughed and cheered. And, admittedly, more than a few of them looked as though they'd been hit over the head with a shovel. For West it didn't matter. He'd started at a higher altitude and he very quickly lit the afterburners.
"Brother Bernie and I come from a great tradition," West continued, his tone rising and falling in the familiar cadence and modulation of the pulpit. "The tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Albert Einnnn-stein. The tradition of Helen Keller and Ella Baker. The tradition of John Dewey, who is the founder of pragmatism, but he was a democratic socialist, too. Reinhold Niebuhr! And my dear brother, one of the greatest folk I've ever met in Iowa, his name is Reverend Gil Dawes, who's a Methodist minister, who has been struggling for fifty YEARS and still on fire for justice! The point is that, you see, democratic socialism is not some kind of alien element. It's organic and indigenous in the history of this nation. Don't allow the 'ism' get in the way of the love of poor people, the love of working people, the love of people of color, the love of gay brothers and lesbian sisters, the love of the elderly and the children and the physically challenged. It's a question of what kind of human being do you want to be."
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"My question for Hillary Clinton is what I would call the Jane Austen Challenge. You all know the great Jane Austen. One of the greatest novelists who ever put pen to paper in the English lang-guage. She talked about 'constancy.' Like Fanny Price in Mansfield Park. Like Annnnne Elliot, in that great novel, Persuasion. And what is constancy except a willingness to act for integrity, sustain moral engagement, and always subordinating political calculation to deep con-VIC-tion. And we have to be honest about our dear sister Hillary Clinton. When it comes to my gay brothers and my lesbian sisters, one year, she says marriage is just male and female. Few years later, she says she's evolved. I say, OK, I'm open to evolution. But there's certain issues that should cut so deep that you don't need to be a thermometer. You can be a thermostat."
If they weren't ready for Cornel West, they damn sure weren't ready for Jane Austen. Gobs throughout the hall were smacked. West rolled on for another 10 minutes and, by the end, there was something quite remarkable about watching him address this audience in this place. You don't often get moments like that in a political campaign, not anymore, anyway. Every moment is strategized to within an inch of its life, and the candidates are fashioned to within an inch of their Ids. Whatever you may think of Cornel West, or of the candidate he had come to Ames to support, this was a slice of genuine surprise, and genuine creative spontaneity, an indication that beneath the surface ice of political calculation there remains a roiling, powerful river. There was a strange kind of optimism in the air when West was done. You can hear it in full at the end of this post, in which we've embedded his entire address, typography being unable to do justice to the riff-heavy rhetoric that West brought into the livestock arena, amid the haybales and the cornstalks, a place where it shouldn't have belonged, but damned well did.
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http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a39737/cornel-west-bernie-sanders-iowa/
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