By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, November 14th, 2012 
I knew when I left for Europe that in all likelihood President Obama would be re-elected, though I was anxious. The stakes were high. If he won, as expected, my return from my few weeks visit would feel like I was truly returning home. If he lost, I would feel like I was venturing to an alien country, one that I had hoped had been left behind, a country trying to revert to a state that didn’t include me, and many others, as full citizens.
A key of the Obama election, presidency and re-election has been inclusion, and the Republicans were pushing back, clearly revealed in their voter ID, voter suppression campaign. The changing demography helps to explain the President’s victory, but his great gift to the country has been to show the country how these changes are our greatest strength. The changing demography plus Obama’s vision go a long way in explaining the election results and the forthcoming changes in the United States.
He did it again in his victory speech as the nation’s storyteller-in-chief. It was a beautiful conclusion to a less than beautiful election. The ugliness of the opposition to Obama left a bad taste in our collective mouths for months, in fact, for years, thanks to the Tea Party, Fox, Rush and company. Obama in his victory speech reminded the American public and the rest of the world to keep our eyes on the prize. I watched on CNN in my hotel room in Warsaw. Today, I watched again with my friends at the Theodore Young Community Center. We decided to share the moment together. We were inspired.
“Our man,” as my dear friend Beverly McCoy speaks of the president, first got our attention, by marking the accomplishment of a free election and celebrating all who took part, linking fundamental political facts with the theme of his campaign, but including those who campaigned against him:
“Tonight, more than 200 years after a former colony won the right to determine its own destiny, the task of perfecting our union moves forward. (Applause.)
I want to . . .
Read more: Coming Home: Demography + Vision = the Re-election of Barack Obama
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 7th, 2012 
The Convention was a big success. Obama’s speech was pitch perfect. The election has been framed on his terms. Much of the immediate commentary doesn’t get how good the speech was, although there seems to be a consensus that in the battle of the conventions, the Democrats won, improving the chances of the President’s re-election. As a practical matter that the brilliance of the speech, with its purposive understatement and disciplined focus, is not appreciated is not really important. But I do want to explain how I see it. The closest commentary to mine that I have read this morning is from a usual suspect, E.J. Dionne.
I will write a post, deliberately considering the speech over the weekend. For now, note: the speech should be understood as it contributed to the success of the Democratic National Convention and the campaign ahead, as it, along with the other speeches at the convention, will frame the politics of second term of the Obama Presidency, and as it is part of the long term story Obama is telling about the American Dream in his project to reinvent American political culture.
Later today, we will post an important post from South Africa on Bishop Desmond Tutu with Tony Blair. For now, if you haven’t seen Obama’s speech yet, take a look, note the eloquence of the language, the presidential demeanor, the seriousness, the command of the moment and of the overall political and economic situation, the engagement with the partisan and the governance tasks at hand.
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 6th, 2012 
The Democrats in the first two days of their convention manufactured news. But I think it is important to understand that it wasn’t propaganda or an infomercial, as many overly cynical academics and commentators would suggest, from Noam Chomsky to Joe Nocera. Rather, like the Republican Convention last week, it was a modern day media event, a televisual combination of demonstration and manifesto, revealing, or as my friend and colleague Daniel Dayan would put it “monstrating,” where the party stands, who stands with the party, how it accounts for the past, present and future. The first two days were particularly about the past and the present, identifying the party. Today, Obama will chart the future. This, at least, is how I understand the storyline. We will know, soon enough, if I am right.
The structure of the presentation, thus far, has been interesting and informative. There was a clear understanding on the part of the convention planners. Before 10:00 PM, without the major networks broadcasting, with a much smaller audience watching, was the demonstration slot. It was the time for showing the stand of the party and demonstrating who stands behind it. Between 10:00 and 11:00 PM, with the full prime time audience watching, the manifesto was presented by the major speakers: on Tuesday, Mayor Julián Castro of San Antonio and First Lady Michelle Obama, on Wednesday, Massachusetts Senate candidate, Elizabeth Warren, and former President Bill Clinton.
The coherence of the Democrats’ presentation was striking. This contrasted with the Republican convention, in which candidate and platform were in tension, and the personal qualities and not the political plans of the candidate took priority, and the speeches didn’t add up. The worst of it was Eastwood’s performance piece. It represented accurately the state of the party, with its pure ideological commitments and tensions, as I have already discussed here earlier during the primary season.
The Democrats revealed some differences of opinion, in symbolic floor scuffle on God and Jerusalem (pandering nonsense it . . .
Read more: The News from Charlotte: The First Two Days of the Democratic National Convention
By Tim Rosenkranz, July 5th, 2011 
It was during the naturalization ceremony of my mother-in-law in Los Angeles, when I got my first glance at the immigrant’s American Dream: a packed auditorium of new US-citizens, exhilarated, proud and happy. When I read Jose Antonio Vargas’s article “OUTLAW: My Life As an Undocumented Immigrant” last week in The New York Times Magazine, I saw the unfulfilled version of this dream. In his article, Vargas gives an unexpected face to the more than eleven million undocumented immigrants living in the US: his own! As a successful journalist, Vargas uses his power to challenge the idea of what a US-American is. As much as I admire Vargas’s courage and hope it is not in vain, his claims are neither unambiguous nor unproblematic. On what grounds do they stand? Legality? Practice? Culture? Also, while Vargas intends to move the boundaries of what constitutes a US-American in the authoritative framework of the nation-state, do his claims not reach further? Do they not challenge the nation-state USA in terms of authoritative legitimacy? Following Vargas’s recent video on DefineAmerican.com, I want to take on his plea: “Let’s talk.”
“There are believed to be 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. We’re not always who you think we are. Some pick your strawberries or care for your children. Some are in high school or college. And some, it turns out, write news articles you might read. I grew up here. This is my home. Yet even though I think of myself as an American and consider America my country, my country doesn’t think of me as one of its own.”
The statement in the beginning of Vargas article shows two problems:
1. The general problem of the USA in sustaining a historically grown, economically integrated and sizable group of undocumented immigrants.
2. The paradoxical life-situation of these immigrants as being part of a social whole, without being legally recognized.
Where is this boundary of recognition drawn? Is it really just a matter of a piece of paper? This . . .
Read more: Who is an American? Reflections on Jose Antonio Vargas
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