The Obama Speech

In addressing the Wright controversy and the race issue, Barack Obama hit the ball out of the park. He did a beautiful job of showing how America can get past its racial obsession, not by burying real grievances, but by keeping them in their proper context:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

The only question is: Will it work? Obama may have said all the right things, but it no longer matters what he says -- it matters what people think he believes. His strongest asset, his authenticity, has been damaged. First the NAFTA flap, then the Gerldine Ferraro nonsense, and now the Wright brouhaha have all served to call Obama's sincerity as a race-transcending straight-shooter into question. And this is a hard problem to overcome.

No matter how fine the speech, it will do little good if people don't buy it.