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" For two weeks,\u00A0Charles P. Pierce is taking a hard-earned and well-deserved vacation. As such, we&amp;#039;re re-promoting some of the greatest pieces he&amp;#039;s written on President Barack Obama for\u00A0Esquire\u00A0over the last several years. We hope that the insights in these classic stories help contextualize\u00A0other happenings you might find in your daily news feed.\u200B We&amp;#039;re continuing this afternoon with this look at\u00A0Barack Obama&amp;#039;s speech at the 2012\u00A0Democratic National Convention, deep in the race for his second term as president.\u00A0\u2014The Editors CHARLOTTE, N.C \u2014 I never heard the music. People told me it was there. People told me it sang to them. People told me that its chords touched them deeply in their hearts. I watched as it make them weep and cheer. I watched as it moved them while I stood there, an unbeliever at the grotto, seeing only rocks and weeds where everyone around me saw and heard and joined in something altogether transformative. I was there in Boston when the president gave the speech that first sent him rocketing up the charts, and I didn&amp;#039;t hear it. Since then, I have seen him give an acceptance speech, an inaugural address, a Nobel oration, and three State of the Unions, and the only thing I remember about any of the latter is that he got heckled by some peckerwood from South Carolina, and that he called out the corporate meat-puppets of the Supreme Court in what I still believe is the finest \u2014 and certainly, the most prescient \u2014 moment of his presidency. But I never found the poetry in it all. I thought he was a good, smart orator with some uniquely gifted writers and a talent for creating a warm and comfortable context in which people could take what they believed were all their best instincts out for a walk. I still believe that. He still reaches people at depths that I cannot fathom. He still reaches them in frequencies beyond my poor ability to hear. I do not hear the music, so I do not understand the man, and that doesn&amp;#039;t matter anymore because he tossed off a single line on Thursday night that did register, that had a resonance and a purpose beyond all the poetry that other people heard. It was a single line, tossed off really a little past halfway through his acceptance speech, and it didn&amp;#039;t even really draw all that much of a response from a crowd that was ready to recreate Bastille Day every time he got from a subject to a verb without turning an ankle. He mentioned it almost as an aside.  &amp;quot;...the hard and frustrating and necessary work of self-government.&amp;quot; That I heard. That I understood. It is not musical. It is not in any way poetic. But it is a clear line drawn between the president and the person and the party that would like to take his job from him. It is now an article of absolute faith among Republicans that &amp;quot;the government&amp;quot; is an entity separate from &amp;quot;the American people,&amp;quot; which they say the same way that the old Jesuits talked about &amp;quot;the mystical Body of Christ.&amp;quot; It is now an ironclad commandment of conservative orthodoxy that &amp;quot;the government&amp;quot; is something parasitic and alien. There is a reason why conservatives talk about &amp;quot;government&amp;quot; and not &amp;quot;self-government,&amp;quot; because to refer to the latter is to concede that &amp;quot;the government&amp;quot; is really the most basic product of our political commonwealth, that it is what we produce among ourselves so as to order the production of everything else that we do together. This is not an idle distinction. It is the entire message of last week&amp;#039;s Republican convention, and it is the entire message of the campaign they are planning to run, and, make no mistake, it resonates deeply with millions of people because it has been spoonfed to them as a kind of noxious anesthetic for almost foty years now, a long enough time for it to seem as though it is the natural order of things. &amp;quot;...the hard and frustrating and necessary work of self-government.&amp;quot; Make no mistake. This little throwaway line was the most direct, and the most serious, challenge that the president threw down at the feet of the Republican ticket on Thursday night because it strikes at the very essence of four decades of conservative political philosophy. We create &amp;quot;the government&amp;quot; we have. &amp;quot;The government&amp;quot; is not imposed from without. It is our creation. Its proper operation is our responsibility. If we do not like the way it operates, we do the hard and frustrating and necessary work to change the way it does. If we believe that it is being hijacked, we do the hard and frustrating and necessary work of using the tools of self-government to run the moneychangers out of the place. If we do not like the way the person we vote for is doing the job with which we have entrusted him \u2014 if he, say, allows the crooks who brought down the economy to walk away free, or if he perpetuates policies antithetical to civil liberties, or if he gets a little too cozy with fracking or if he gives away too much in some Grand Bargain \u2014 then we do the hard and frustrating and necessary work of self-government to hold his damn feet to the fire and say, &amp;quot;No further.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;...the hard and frustrating and necessary work of self-government.&amp;quot; Our government has been set up as an ongoing creative process. That&amp;#039;s the real genius of it. It is what we make of it. It is our fault when we create a grotesque out of it like we have at this moment in time. Two largely corporate-owned parties, one of them a little nicer to gay people, and women, and old folk, a system sodden with money and corruption and increasingly unresponsive to anyone who doesn&amp;#039;t pay to corrupt it even more. This is what we created. It was not imposed from without. We voted for the politicians who voted to put on the Supreme Court the men who unleashed the floodgates. We voted for the politicians who deregulated Wall Street \u2014 and Bill Clinton was one of them \u2014 and turned the vandals loose in the treasure house. Or we didn&amp;#039;t vote, and we didn&amp;#039;t realize that not voting is also a creative act. There is nobody in this country who is not complicit in the current state of our politics. &amp;quot;...the hard and frustrating and necessary work of self-government.&amp;quot; Yeah, he had me there, because I think that was the hard, crystalline core of what he was getting at on Thursday night, and what he will try to sell to the country over the next couple of months. Ever since that speech in Boston, I&amp;#039;ve thought that he was simply setting himself up as a vessel into which people could pour their own best hopes for the country. Since he&amp;#039;s been in office, he&amp;#039;s been confounding in that he seems to think of himself \u2014 and he reinforced this on Thursday night at the end of his speech \u2014 as the instrument of everything except the country&amp;#039;s righteous anger. But now, in the only really hard fight he&amp;#039;s ever had since losing to Bobby Rush long ago, the president seemed to realize that this was no less a challenge to himself than it was to his opponent. We create our own government. We are responsible for its beauty and for its ugliness. We are responsible for its glories and for its failures and, most important, we are responsible for amending those failures no matter who are their most immediate architects. This is not a challenge Willard Romney even recognizes, but the president realizes, I think, that it demands that we take our responsibility to the political commonwealth seriously enough, even if we re-elect him, to kick Obama&amp;#039;s ass around the block, if needs be. &amp;quot;...the hard and frustrating and necessary work of self-government.&amp;quot; There&amp;#039;s something strange stirring there in the grotto. Amen. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a15689/obama-convention-speech-2012-12454673/>