YES (Change) WE CAN (Believe In)

Speaking on the night of his unexpected defeat, Barack Obama coined a new slogan, "Yes We Can." An Alternet piece by Stephen Rosenfeld cites psychologists and pundits who say Obama's use of "we" is an important derivation from Clinton and Edwards's use of "I" as in "I will work for you." Rosenfeld calls this magic, although if you read my previous post, the magic is embedded in the notion of "change." Still that term has been so overused that the magic is almost completely dissipated. All the more reason Obama, with his clearly best-of-the-field oratory style , went to the new slogan, which coincidentally has the same syllable count as "Let's Go Mets." (Sorry, I mean "Four More Years.") Anyway it was a nice, smooth delivery, and the speech (like a good screenplay) had a beginning, middle, and an end. "Something is going on in America," he intoned. But you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Media?

               There is a certain MLK + JFK formula at work here, and I like the linking of civil rights, the labor movement, and women's and immigrants rights movements under an umbrella that even non-minorities can huddle. But I couldn't help but remember that the three-word mantra was achieved by substituting "we" for the "I" in the title of Sammy Davis, Jr.'s 1965 autobiography, "Yes I Can." Hopefully, Barack can avoid someday posing for a picture like this:

But I guess it's also true that "Yes We Can" is English for "Si Se Puede," (syllable count = "Let's Go Yankees") and this was used quite extensively during the anti-anti-immigration marches of 2006 and I guess the labor movement in general. I'm not sure how Cesar Chavez and crew would have cottoned to Obama's intoning about "Yes We Can" being whispered by "pioneers forging across an unforgiving wilderness" (populated by unforgiving Native Americans including various tribes claimed by Luis Valdez and greater Californiaztlan), but maybe Chavez had read that Sammy Davis, Jr.'s mother was either Puerto Rican or Cuban, and decided that si se pudo.