"Voice adaptation is still the original British sin....We feel that our voices are who we are and that to have more than one, or to use different voices for different occasions, represents at best a Janus-faced duplicity and at a worst the loss of our very souls.
"Obama can do young Jewish male, old lady from the South Side, white woman from Kansas, Kenyan elders, white Harvard nerds, black Columbia nerds, activist women, churchmen, security guards, bank tellers....Obama had the audacity to suggest that even if you can't see it stamped on their faces most people...have complicated back stories, messy histories, multiple narratives.
"The single-voiced Obamanation crowd. They have a great fear of what they see as Obama's doubling ways. These are fears that have their roots in an anxiety about voice. When he talks to us he sure sounds like us - but behind our backs we're still clinging to our religion and our guns. Right up to the wire, Obama made many black men and women of Jackson's generation suspicious. How can the man who passes between culturally black and white voices with such flexibility, with such ease, be an honest man?
"For reasons that are obscure to me, those qualities we cherish in our artists we condemn in our politicians. In our artists, we look for the many-coloured voice, the multiple sensibility. From our politicians though, we still look for ideological heroism, despite everything. We consider pragmatists to be weak....To me, this is a doleful conclusion. It is exactly men with such intellectual peculiarities that I have always hoped to see in politics. The voice that speaks with such freedom, thus unburdened by dogma and personal bias, thus flooded with empathy, might make a good president."
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