The Sister Act at Barack Obama’s Nomination
By Kenneth J. Cooper
If it wasn’t, “We Are Family” should have been declared the official theme song of the Democratic convention. The tune was played often enough, and its unifying message fits Barack Obama’s call for Americans to come together, despite differences of race, class, region or party.
That was the obvious political message Democrats were trying to send. A subtler one was resonating with some portion of half the nation’s voters. “We Are Family” is a 1970s tune by Sister Sledge about sisters being together.
So apt for a national political convention where women were more prominent than ever before. The first night’s biggest speech was Michelle Obama’s, the second’s was Hillary Rodham Clinton’s. Only a single speech by a woman, Geraldine Ferraro’s as the vice presidential nominee in 1984, compares in the amount of public attention either received.
From the podium in Denver, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi guided official business with light taps of her gavel. Memorial tributes to Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, who died last week in Cleveland, flowed from Hillary Clinton and other speakers. For the first time, women made up a majority of the party’s convention delegates.
Lesser-known women rose to score political points for the party. The curiously-named Quincy Lucas, a black teacher from Delaware, offered her senator, Joe Biden, as the nominee for vice president. She began, stiffly, by noting her sister had been killed by an ex-boyfriend five years ago. Why did she start with a personal tragedy? Biden, she pointed out, wrote the Violence Against Women Act to combat domestic violence.
A humble “grandmother from Alabama,” Lily Ledbetter, conceded in her drawl that she was a surprising choice to speak at the convention. She told how, after years as a supervisor at a Goodyear plant, she learned she had long been paid less than men doing the same job. She sued, and won, until the Supreme Court ruled last year she should have sued within six months of the first pay disparity–even though she didn’t know about it.
Ledbetter called for equal pay for equal work, a cause usually associated with feminists who are younger and from big cities like New York or San Francisco. To hear it from a retired white woman from Alabama busted up that stereotype.
Women carried much the party’s message on the big issue of health care. Their stories about people struggling with health problems carried an emotional load that the same anecdotes, if told by men, would not. Who, after all, usually cares for a sick child or, for that matter, a parent?
Perhaps the most touching passage in Michelle Obama’s speech was remembrance of her father, who was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in his 30s but coped for years without complaint.
“As he got sicker, it got harder for him to walk. It took him longer to get dressed in the morning,” she recalled. “But if he was in pain, he never let on. He never stopped smiling and laughing, even while struggling to button his shirt, even while using two canes to get himself across the room to give my mom a kiss. He just woke up a little earlier and worked a little harder.”
Hillary Clinton related a memorable meeting at a campaign stop. “I will always remember the single mom who had adopted two kids with autism, didn’t have health insurance and discovered she had cancer,” Clinton recalled. “But she greeted me with her bald head painted with my name on it and asked me to fight for health care.”
Congresswoman Louise Slaughter from New York decried the millions without health insurance after reading aloud this letter from a Nevada woman: “My husband has Parkinson’s and was forced to retire. He has been on disability for three years and Medicare doesn’t meet his prescription needs. I have to pay my own insurance premium so our Medicare expenses are quite high. Our health care system doesn’t work.”
Women played a major role in showing the party has family values–and doesn’t just talk about them, in the intolerant way conservative Republicans do.
Cameras showed Michelle Obama in tears as she listened to Beau Biden, Delaware’s attorney general and the senator’s son, talk about being a little boy when his biological mother and a sister were killed in a car accident–as the mother was taking her children to buy a Christmas tree.
After her speech, Michelle Obama walked daughters Malia and Sasha over to a video screen where Barack Obama appeared. The girls called him “Daddy.” That night technology united a family separated by 600 miles.
White TV commentators rushed to put the family into a context viewers would grasp, comparing the Obamas to the only Kennedys ever to live in the White House, or the Huxtables on the Cosby Show. That a metaphor was needed at all suggests the commentators, and many white viewers, have trouble seeing the Obamas as individuals or recognizing them as an ordinary family with educated parents and happy children.
They’re a family, an American family.
Kenneth J. Cooper is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
