The Slave Reference

So apparently I wasn't the only one that was somewhat bothered by the " endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth" portion of Obama's speech.

Here's Harry Brown's comment:

It gets worse, a lot worse, if you follow the rest of the passage logically in terms of the contrast he has set up. The productive good guys of the next sentence, the doers and makers who brought not just prosperity but freedom – those folks clearly must have preferred work over leisure, or maybe they scored them even. And the final sentence tells us explicitly who he is talking about: farmers and settlers, sweatshop-workers and … slaves.

The idea that slaves helped build American greatness because (among other things) they preferred work to leisure is so offensively stupid that it clearly wandered into Obama’s speech via sloppiness rather than by design. (This is in itself undermines his reputation for wordcraft and attention to detail: the only reference to slavery in the inaugural speech of the first African-American president was permitted to carry this crazed logic.) Maybe we can just write it off as the sort of thing that happens when you’re absent-mindedly knitting together clichés and you drop a stitch. Nobody seems to have noticed it or taken offence anyway.

But that's not all I'm annoyed about being missing from the speech. Perhaps it's not front most in Obama's mind as it would be on mine, but I couldn't make an inaugural speech and not reference the fact that slaves built the city where I'm making this speech. pointing that out is not divisive and could be used to great effect.