The President's speech

The first was the Sept. 11 uprising in which four of our citizens and our ambassador to Libya were slain. While we do not yet know with certainty what happened that dreadful night, this was a political hurricane. Gov. Romney tried, and failed, shamefully to exploit it to his advantage. At a time of national crisis and united vulnerability, he attacked the President for “apologizing” to Ambassador Stevens’ killers — something he simply did not do — and did nothing but ensure that the democratic fact-finding process split on partisan lines. In fact, I first learned of the incident from a close relative, who took Romney’s stance on President Obama’s “apology” to the killers and told me to listen to his Sept. 12 speech from the Rose Garden. When I did just that, I discovered, to my horror, that many conservative commentators quoted only the following sound bite: “Since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others.” They failed to provide their listeners with the very next sentences of the address: “But there is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence. None. The world must stand together to unequivocally reject these brutal acts.” This trick can only be unmasked as a deliberate, disgusting attempt at mass deception, feeding off the blood of slain Americans.

But perhaps the most insidious propaganda — I will not even consider it as an attempt at rational argument — I encountered before the election attacked the President’s personality and pedigree. Some of you may have seen “2016: Obama’s America,” the sham of a documentary by conservative author and commentator Dinesh D’Souza, which purported to portray the United States after four more years of an Obama administration. Ten minutes into the film, D’Souza discussed several passages from Obama’s 1995 memoir “Dreams from My Father” and then brought a psychiatrist on camera, who proceeded in all earnestness to dissect the President’s psyche on the basis of these literary descriptions. This move was nearly outrageous enough to mask the fact that the President’s personal background had entered political discourse in the first place. All this raged against waves of ghoulish music that waxed and waned at dramatic points in the narrative, culminating when D’Souza suggested that the President was not only un-American (due to his Kenyan anti-colonialist upbringing), but also anti-American. According to the New York Daily News, the film earned $20 million at the box office, leaving the second-highest documentary this year in the dust by a factor of five.

Even if this documentary reached only ultraconservatives at the fringes of the debate, I often found myself surrounded by a surprising number of individuals who believed that a radical (Muslim) socialist leftist had invaded our shores, brainwashed our youth with his empty charisma and infiltrated the highest office of state. A few days before the election, another family member shared an image of Romney at a campaign rally, his hand uplifted and face blazing in the spotlight from behind, the image underscored with the imperative, “Vote for love of country.” This slogan deeply puzzled me. I asked whether it implied that members of the Democratic Party did not love their country or were voting for ulterior reasons. The response I received confirmed this assessment: “It means the motivation to vote is not driven by revenge.” Revenge? The word echoes perhaps the darkest and most distressing claim issued by some Obama detractors throughout the campaign, that the social reforms — like “Obamacare” — the President proposed, the alternative America he envisioned or the resounding energy we witnessed at the Democratic National Convention, reflected neither substantive policy nor urgent need for reform, but the empty drone of class warfare and resentment of the wealthy by the “vulnerable” elements of society. The accusations continued, though the only reference to class warfare stemmed from Romney’s self-avowed abandonment of all but 47 percent of Americans.

On Tuesday night we were told that Barack Obama had won. I heard the news with more relief than enthusiasm. But then the President began to speak. Lincoln was in his voice: He assuaged a union beleaguered by long travail. He admitted the messiness of the democratic process while he reaffirmed its necessity. Above all and once more the President dared, with dignity, to hope. If only because of Hope, the last creature in Pandora’s box after every other evil had been unleashed, I slept easier that night.

The battleground will shift slowly while human nature remains constant. I hope and pray we can work together to fight for what we believe in and give ground where it is due, above all with the charity and respect that becomes a free and democratic society.

Brandon Bark is a classics major from Baton Rouge, La. He can be reached at bbark@princeton.edu.