Politics

David Brooks calls Obama’s race speech ‘one of the highlights of the presidency’

Jeff Poor Media Reporter
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On Sunday’s broadcast of “Meet the Press” on NBC, New York Times columnist David Brooks gushed over President Barack Obama’s speech on race in the wake of the George Zimmerman verdict a week earlier.

“It seemed superficially unimportant, but it’s important to remember race is his first subject, as it would be if you had a black father and a white mother,” Brooks said. “And all the mental habits, he breached all the other issues, grow out of the way he framed race and the way he started thinking about race — his tendency to do, ‘On the one hand, on the other,’ his desire to reconcile opposites, his ability to see different points of view. All the stuff we’ve come to see him apply to every other issue, it started with race.  And I thought this speech was one of the highlights of the presidency.”

Brooks said the speech had all the components one would expect for such an occasion.

“I thought it was a symphony of indignation, professionalism, executive responsibility, personal feeling,” Brooks said. “It had all these different things woven together, I thought beautifully.  But it’s important to remember, race is how he thinks.”

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