Charles Pierce: The Best Speech in Iowa Didn't Come From Hillary or Bernie

Going to have to read up on John Dewey.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a39737/cornel-west-bernie-sanders-iowa/

"Brother Bernie and I come from a great tradition. The tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Albert Einstein. The tradition of Helen Keller and Ella Baker. The tradition of John Dewey, who is the founder of pragmatism, but he was a democratic socialist, too."

"What a blessing it is to be here," West began. "All of my brothers and sisters of all colors here in central I-O-WA!"

Suddenly, the whole atmosphere of the day changed. Some of the people who'd stuck around looked on in something like awe. Some of them laughed and cheered. And, admittedly, more than a few of them looked as though they'd been hit over the head with a shovel. For West it didn't matter. He'd started at a higher altitude and he very quickly lit the afterburners.

He jibed at the Republicans for having "a nervous breakdown in public," and for a "lack of integrity, mediocrity and mendacity EVERYwhere." He jibed at HRC and the Democratic party establishment as well. "Glad to hear my dear sister Hillary Clinton sounding so progressive," he declaimed. "I salute her effort. But it's lip service if you don't come to terms with your…actions.



If they weren't ready for Cornel West, they damn sure weren't ready for Jane Austen. Gobs throughout the hall were smacked. West rolled on for another 10 minutes and, by the end, there was something quite remarkable about watching him address this audience in this place. You don't often get moments like that in a political campaign, not anymore, anyway. Every moment is strategized to within an inch of its life, and the candidates are fashioned to within an inch of their Ids. Whatever you may think of Cornel West, or of the candidate he had come to Ames to support, this was a slice of genuine surprise, and genuine creative spontaneity, an indication that beneath the surface ice of political calculation there remains a roiling, powerful river. There was a strange kind of optimism in the air when West was done. You can hear it in full at the end of this post, in which we've embedded his entire address, typography being unable to do justice to the riff-heavy rhetoric that West brought into the livestock arena, amid the haybales and the cornstalks, a place where it shouldn't have belonged, but damned well did.