An Unlikely Pragmatist

Abstract

Toward the end of James Kloppenberg's Reading Obama , the author ponders an anecdote from the candidate's speech on race in Philadelphia in March 2008: Obama reported that a young white woman named Ashley, telling fellow volunteers in South Carolina why she'd joined the Obama campaign, explained that to save money for her cancer-stricken, bankrupted mother, she'd pretended to love mustard and relish sandwiches. She was volunteering, she said, in hopes of improving health care for families like hers. When an elderly black man's turn came to tell why he'd joined, he said, simply, "'I am here because of Ashley,'" and Obama told his Philadelphia audience that "That single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is where we start." But it's only a start, especially for Kloppenberg, who writes, "Placing the speech in the context drawn from civic republicanism and communitarianism, from discourse ethics and deliberative democracy, from historicism and Rawls' overlapping consensus, from Geertz's hermeneutics and the neopragmatists' emphasis on fallibilism, it is easy to see in the speech most of the principal components of Obama's worldview."