From The Institute for Southern Studies: http://www.southernstudies.org/2013/01/voices-as-obama-lays-out-progressive-agenda-white-south-slips-into-political-irrelevancy.htm
By Joe Atkins, Labor South
Thu, 01/24/2013
On the Bibles of two men once reviled in the South, President Obama took the oath of office for his second term Monday, a day that also honored one of those two men, Martin Luther King Jr.
After a first term in which he relied heavily on Wall Street insiders like Timothy Geithner, Obama outlined a decidedly progressive-minded agenda for his second term. It’s one that the South’s white oligarchy of business, political, religious and media leaders will fight tooth and nail.
In his speech, Obama made clear his commitment to pay equity, immigration reform, gay rights, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. He offered “hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice.” This country “cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it,” he told Americans.
In the words of writer John Nichols of The Nation, Obama in his speech “completed the arc from FDR and LBJ to today.”
Tea Partyers and the rest of the GOP’s right wing — groups with distinctively Southern accents — are bound to decry the speech and the man who made it for declaring “class warfare,” as if a declaration of war hadn’t been declared long ago by their own financial backers.
Obama called for equal pay for “our wives, our mothers and daughters.” He reached out to “the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity.” He called for equal treatment for gay men and women.
Continue reading at: http://www.southernstudies.org/2013/01/voices-as-obama-lays-out-progressive-agenda-white-south-slips-into-political-irrelevancy.htm
