June 8, 2015  

President Obama’s Eulogy at the Funeral of Beau Biden

ACADEME BLOG

This is a very moving eulogy. It is also a great testament to the deep friendship between President Obama and Vice President Biden.

Indeed, although—or perhaps because—it is a very personal response to a deeply personal sense of loss, rather than some broader statement on public policy, political positions, or the pressing issues of the day, I think that it may stand as one of the most noteworthy and enduring speeches ever delivered by President Obama or, for that matter, by any president over the past few decades.

In a way that transcends conventional rhetoric, President Obama manages to make his own sense of loss and the Bidens’ sense of loss meaningful for all Americans. In a way that transcends conventional rhetoric, he manages to convey how Beau Biden’s life story was a distinctly American story.

It is a speech that should cause most listeners to take stock of their…

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About martinkich

I am a Professor of English at Wright State University's Lake Campus, where I have been a faculty member for more than 30 years. I have served four terms as the president of the WSU chapter of AAUP, one term as the president of the Ohio Conference of AAUP, and three terms as an at-large member of the executive committee of AAUP's Collective Bargaining Congress. I was elected to the Ohio Conference Board ahead of the statewide effort in 2011 to repeal by referendum Ohio's Senate Bill 5, which would have eliminated collective-bargaining rights for all public employees in the state. As co-chair of the Ohio Conference's Communication Committee, I began to do much more overtly political writing during that campaign. It was a tremendous learning experience, though often quite overwhelming. At the beginning of 2018, our chapter at Wright State went of strike for three weeks. The second longest strike by a public university faculty in U.S. history, it was necessitated by an effort to gut our contract. Everyone who stood firm to preserve our contract paid a substantial financial as well as emotional price to do so, but the sense of solidarity--not just with our Wright State colleagues, but with our students, the faculty at other Ohio institutions, the members of other unions, and many community supporters who joined our picket lines and helped in countless other ways--was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I have sustained my activism over several decades, and at the risk of stating the obvious, I have very much enjoyed the work, I have been grateful for what we have sometimes managed to accomplish, and I continue to cherish the great friendships that I have made. Receiving AAUP's Sternberg and Tacey awards for those efforts has been a great honor, but also has seemed a little redundant. Beyond my blogging, I have been a fairly productive writer of articles and reviews for academic journals and more general periodicals. I have written one book and co-authored another, and I have co-edited a collection of essays. I am currently working on two book manuscripts.

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