Are people really more open to Barack Obama’s oratory because he is black? John McWhorter seems to think so:

As to [Mario] Cuomo’s speech, 1984 was about the last time that a middle-aged white man could pull off true oratory without seeming pretentious. What white 40-something could orate to all of America as Obama can now? The nation’s openness to Obama’s orating – i.e., OK, here he goes, shh, this is going to be deep! – is of a part with what helped get him elected: his color.

Yes: Legions of whites see him as a symbol of America’s having gotten beyond the hideousness of our racial past, of having healed the most grievous division of our history. This symbolic status makes us hear Obama in a special way, as speaking above the fundamentally dress-down and speak-down nature of post-countercultural America – without seeming phony.

We can drink in his words as music rather than dismissing him as merely mimicking the lofty language of a distant time, because we see an ineluctable justice in the sheer fact of his having become our leader.

We assume that, having fashioned himself as an achieving adult despite being someone who not long ago would have been relegated to society’s margins, he has something to tell us about real work, about making the best of the not-so-good – that is, about so much of what being American has always meant.

Return to Oratory: Why O Can Lead (NYP)

I’ve only been up for a couple of hours but already “Obama” is the most popular word of the day. I’ll be out and about in New York today, soaking up the atmosphere. Times Square for the swearing-in ceremony. Then back to Brooklyn for the after-party. I’ll be live-blogging on my Twitter page if you want to see what I am up to.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Who would have believed five years ago, let alone forty-one years ago when MLK died, that a black man would occupy the White House in 2009? And how fitting that tomorrow is the day.

As this piece in the Washington Post (via Trippi) shows, Obama and America have come a long way in a very short time:

He was born on Aug. 4, 1961. On that day in Alabama and Mississippi, an early voting rights battle was waged, with lawsuits filed in three counties where voting officials imposed prohibitively rigid standards on black applicants. In one Mississippi county, there were 2,490 blacks — and none was registered to vote. In New Orleans that day, a federal appeals court ruled on the expulsion of six black students from Alabama State College who staged a sit-in at the Montgomery County Courthouse lunch grill, where African Americans could not eat. In Washington, five blacks who had been arrested by security police for trying to integrate the Glen Echo Amusement Park in the Maryland suburbs were asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case.

And in Shreveport, La., on the day Obama was born, a squadron of policemen assembled in the Continental Trailways bus depot to uphold local and state laws prohibiting black people from stepping foot in a waiting room reserved for whites. Across the Deep South that summer, black and white Freedom Riders had encountered violence and arrests as they challenged Jim Crow laws by trying to integrate buses and bus stations. At 5:20 that August morning, four African Americans arrived at the Trailways depot with tickets to take the 5:45 from Shreveport to Jackson, Miss., the hub of protests where hundreds of Freedom Riders had been arrested in previous months. When the four attempted to enter the white waiting room, they were met by the Shreveport police chief and 40 officers. The riders refused orders to leave and were arrested for disturbing the peace, along with two compatriots who had driven them to the bus station and were accused of “counseling and encouraging” them.

Aug. 4, 1964, the day Obama turned 3, was one of the seminal tragic dates in civil rights history. It was on that day that FBI agents in Mississippi, at the end of a two month search, discovered the bodies of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney after bulldozing a partly constructed earthen dam in the woods outside the town of Philadelphia. The three men — Goodman and Schwerner white, Chaney black, all voting-rights organizers during what was known as Freedom Summer — had been murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan with the implicit acquiescence of racist local authorities.

Seven months later, President Lyndon B. Johnson traveled along Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the U.S. Capitol to urge a joint session of Congress to pass legislation that would remove every barrier discriminating against blacks and their right to vote. The National Voting Rights Act of 1965 moved swiftly through Congress, with the Senate giving final approval to the conference report ¿ on Aug. 4, Obama’s fourth birthday. “We’ve lost the South for a generation,” Johnson told Bill Moyers, his aide, after he signed the measure two days later. Perhaps so, as it turned out, but without Johnson and voting rights, the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president might not have been possible 44 years later.

Restless Searcher on an Improbable Path (WaPo)

Peggy Noonan might not be to everyone’s tastes, but she does a good job of bringing pre-inauguration Washington to life. She describes stores full of Obama memorabilia, motorcades whizzing through town and a cab driver who wrote an inaugural address in the hope that one of Obama’s minions might get into his cab–which, of course, happened. Most of all though, she exhorts people to put aside their cynicism and just enjoy this historic occasion:

And this has grown old, and maybe it’s the last time to say it, history moving so fast, but there’s something we all know so well that we are perhaps forgetting to see it in the forefront. But a long-oppressed people have raised up a president. It is moving and beautiful and speaks to the unending magic and sense of justice of our country. The other day the journalist John O’Sullivan noted that 150 years after slavery, a black man stands in the place of Lincoln in the inaugural stands, and this country has proved again that anything is possible, that if we can do this we can do anything. That is a good thing to remember at a difficult time.

What is required for full enjoyment of an inauguration, from opening prayers to speeches to marching bands is, in the great 19th-century phrase, the willing suspension of disbelief. If you don’t put your skepticism aside, you will not fully absorb and experience the drama.

Suspend Your Disbelief ( WSJ)