International Law

The mainstream media and the blogosphere have been obsessing over Barack Obama's speech on race this week.  However, rather than chiming in to the debate or linking to some of the commentary, I thought I'd highlight a few interesting posts that approach race and Obama's speech from a sightly different perspective. 

First, is Slate's discovery of an Obama interview in 1990 for a feature in the Chicago Reporter about the lag in minority hiring by top Chicago law firms:

Second, is John W Dean's piece for FindLaw's Writ, which wonders whether Obama's speech revealed him to be too intellectual to be President:

With his speech addressing race in America, Obama has done something that few politicians are willing to do: speak with compelling intellectual honesty. Rather than fuzzy-up difficult and troubling questions about race, he confronted them directly. Rather than avoiding issues that are typically ignored, he brought them forward for public discussion. Most strikingly, he did this with nuance, great tact, and conspicuous intelligence.

Many commentators were struck by the level of erudition Senator Obama employed in his speech. For example, Newsweek's Howard Fineman asked, "Did the blockheads understand it?" Not wanting to sound elitist, Howard quickly added that of course, everyone is a bit of a blockhead. I do not know if everyone understood the speech or not, but I do know that it is a pleasure to have a candidate running for the highest office in the land who is not only not trying to pretend to be dumb and inarticulate but rather willingly showing he is, in fact, smart as hell.

Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech was not unlike his insightful and somewhat erudite books - Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope - with one large exception: Relatively few people will read Obama's books but many have been (or may be) exposed to his historic speech.

Computers have made it rather simple to determine the intelligence or grade level of a speech by measuring it with the Flesch-Kincaid test, which is found on the Tools/Options menu of Microsoft Word. This widely-employed measurement device determines the degree of difficulty of the written (and spoken) word.

Enterprising linguists and others have applied the test to a wide variety of material. For instance, the folks at youDictionary have tested the inaugural addresses of presidents. They discovered that no president since Woodrow Wilson has come close to delivering speeches pitched at a 12^th grade level. Bush II's first inaugural address was at a 7.5 grade level, which ranked him near Eisenhower's second address (7.5), Nixon's first (7.6), LBJ's only (7.0), and FDR's fourth (8.1). Clinton's two addresses, by contrast, scored at the 9th grade level (9.4 and 8.8 respectively).

I tested Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech and it scores at a 10.5 grade level, which by current standards is in the stratosphere. But maybe he was being too smart to win the presidency.

Read more here.

And finally, here is the provocative YouTube video - Is Obama Wright? - that a low-level staff member in John McCain?s political department was suspended for circulating: