Words - and why I voted for Obama

I wrote this column in The Times Herald Record shortly after Barack Obama's speech on racism during his campaign for the presidency:

We take words for granted. And even when we notice what they can and should be — conveyors of truth, the very stuff of hope and promise and beauty — we're only too happy to forget their importance in our workaday lives, and never more so than during a presidential campaign.
Talk is cheap, we say. Sticks and stones, we chant. You gotta walk it like you talk it. And so on.
In one of his most famous works, the poet Philip Larkin, who, like all poets, knew the importance of words, wrote that "Days are where we live."
With all due respect, if he'd grant me his poetic license for a moment, I'd amend that line to say that words are where we live, now more than ever before. And where we live these days is a none-too-pretty place.
The air we breathe is heavy with a smog of words — ill-considered, hateful, angry, resentful — that corrode the possibility of civil discourse, of understanding one another. I can't think of a better example of the Biblical Tower of Babel than what happens to the country during a presidential campaign.
So, when words are put to a different, conciliatory purpose — in the heat of a campaign, no less — when someone makes a different sound, it behooves a body to listen.
Which is what I did last Tuesday when Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama gave a speech he didn't have to give about a subject most of us would rather not look at in any serious way.
Ostensibly, Obama's speech was an effort to rescue his campaign from the incendiary verbal clutches of his outspoken — some would say racist — pastor, one Jeremiah Wright. The speech, which Obama wrote himself, could have been so much less than it was.
I won't detail the traps that lay in wait for him by undertaking this speech; soon enough, the ugly particulars that prompted it will be forgotten. But I'm convinced the speech itself won't suffer the same fate. Something different was said by a presidential candidate last week, and attention needs to be paid.
This was a speech that tried to use words to heal instead of harm, to explain instead of excuse, to praise and not to blame. Obama's words drew a portrait of a racially polarized America that anybody could recognize. His words were grounded in experience, not generalities. He talked about himself, but not in heroic terms. He spoke about the way people see things — often ugly things — when they sit around the kitchen table or down at the corner barber shop.
I have no idea if Obama's words will win a single vote, no idea if people will accept his explanation of his relationship to Wright, and I don't care. I'll leave that sort of evaluation to the people whose job it is to autopsy the words of politicians.
Such autopsies are easy, since so many of the words favored by politicians are the rootless creation of the strategy session, the focus group, the pollster's questionnaire.
But even the most skeptical post-speech analysts I saw or read appeared to be stunned at what they'd heard last week. They'd heard words that were alive, words that painted pictures of ideas that told a larger story than they'd expected to hear. Words that aimed to tell the truth, and frequently hit their target.
Does this mean Barack Obama should be our next president? Ask a political coroner. All I can tell you is how I felt that day, how the air felt fresh and clean and new again.