"Obama Sounds Presidential but Speech Isn't About Race" John KassSen. Barack Obama not only confronted race in his speech Tuesday, he transcended it, and no honest American ear could ever be immune to the pitch, tone and quality of his words; not yours, not mine.
So much of what he said was undeniable and true and honestly spoken, in the calm and clear voice of a reasonable man explaining America's most unreasonable and hateful topic.
"We've heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that's it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase reconciliation on the cheap," said the senator from Illinois.
"On the other end, we've heard my former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, use 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; that rightly offend white and black alike."
As he spoke, I saw him as the next president of the United States and thought of voters feeling the same. A few moments afterward, one of the wire service headlines said: "Obama Speech Confronts Racial Division," a view certain to continue, reinforced by the media at every opportunity, that Obama faced the dragon and emerged from Philadelphia as triumphant as
St. George. All of this is quite nice indeed. But confronting race wasn't the task at hand.
Obama's obligation Tuesday was not to talk about race. We talk and talk about race in America. We use it to measure everything, from public contracts to college and graduate school admission standards and, sometimes, it seems we talk of nothing else.
No, Obama's job was to address and condemn and isolate his candidacy and his nation from the ugly, anti-American rhetoric espoused by his pastor, Rev. Wright.
In talking to Tribune reporters about this Friday, and in other comments made over the weekend, Obama offered the view that Wright's passions were set in the Jim Crow '50s and '60s, and you can hear the anger in Wright's comments as a relic of our ugly, racist, American past.
Yet anyone remotely interested in the truth of the Wright/Obama story knows this one isn't really about race in the conventional sense.
It is about the fact that Wright cursed the United States and blasphemed from the pulpit. It is about the fact that videos of Wright's comments are circulated endlessly on the Internet, no doubt to the delight of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
It is about the fact that on the Sunday following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Rev. Wright offered this particularly hateful bit of homily that sounds ghost-written by Louis Farrakhan:
"America's chickens are coming home to roost."
Does Obama believe or countenance such ugly nonsense? Of course not. His is truly an American story, impossible anywhere but here.
Yet when we confront race in America, shouldn't we not only confront white racism, but another type, mostly unmentioned and rhetorically dangerous, in which black leaders of Wright's generation sometimes say ridiculous and hateful things and are shielded?
In America's unofficial white liberal catechism that frames so much of the discussion, whites often pretend they don't hear such black hate speech, because to hear it would compel them to challenge it, and a challenge offers the prospect of being denounced by black leadership as racist.
There is nothing more terrified than a white political reporter about to be called a racist. Unless, of course, it is a "transcendent" black presidential candidate of great promise, harangued by political thugs as not being black enough, perhaps concerned he'd be denounced as a traitor if he condemned not only Wright's words, but Wright himself.
Obama must have heard such hate speech from that pulpit for years and said nothing of it, even though the white grandmother who loved him and helped raise him would have certainly cringed before Wright's anger.
Yet Obama did invoke his grandmother Tuesday in his speech. He said she loved him even though he'd heard her admit some racial prejudice that "made me cringe." He treated Wright as a complicated man, yet he reduced his grandmother to a two-dimensional rhetorical device, to protect her grandson from criticism that he didn't go far enough to condemn Wright's foolishness.
He was saying: I love Wright, who is black. I love my grandmother, who is white. Would you have me damn my own beloved grandmother by damning Wright, as he damned the United States?
It hurt me to watch it. And, I hope for his sake, that it hurt him to say it.
Obama joined Wright's church for a reason, just as he knew there was a reason the political fixer Tony Rezko was trying to seduce him. Obama is no fool. He gets to the edge of things.
So on Tuesday, he stepped lightly, expertly shifting the debate about Wright to a wider debate on solid ground, about race and American hopes and American guilt.