While Obama’s speech was impressive on multiple levels, I would find little to disagree with in James Taranto’s critical take on it today:

Obama was trying to accomplish something very specific by dragging his “white grandmother” into this political mess. He was trying to diminish Wright’s hateful theology by implying that it too is a private matter. Said Obama:

For the men and women of Rev. Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years.

That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Rev. Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.

Note how Obama elides the difference between a comment at the “kitchen table” and a sermon delivered to a congregation of thousands and recorded on DVD.

Obama rightly faulted his spiritual mentor for using “incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation.” But he tried to treat Wright’s most outrageous comments as if they were aberrations rather than the most extreme expressions of an extreme ideology …

Obama is saying the right words to the right audience — the Democratic primary voters — and I think that his speech today will most likely rescue him from the worst possible damage that the Wright sound bites could have done him in the upcoming primaries. However, he has evaded the most fundamental issues involved, and the ones which would rightly be brought to bear in the general election were he the nominee. In addition, in his speech today he is portraying himself as the necessary source of racial healing in America. But as the always astute Rush Limbaugh observed today on his radio show, Obama is in a real sense the product of racial healing in America. In that distinction lies a whole lot of argument, to be sure. By making today’s speech about the whole broad topic of race, instead of being more narrowly about the specific and horrendous things that the Rev. Wright publicly asserted in his church, Obama has opened up a whole new area of debate. And this election just gets interestinger and interestinger.

...................
Share this!

PERMALINK

Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:

• Barack about to try and write off Wright?
• That was quick
• Obama and the Reverend
• Friday note