This morning in Philadelphia, Barack Obama gave his promised speech on race; and a remarkable speech it was, for many reasons. Reactions to it are all over the map, which is no surprise, and no doubt there will be many more to come over the next few days, but I think we can already say it was an excellent speech; and while it’s always risky to try to write history in the moment, I think too that we can say that whatever becomes of Sen. Obama’s candidacy, this will be seen as an important moment in American history. As Mark Hemingway wrote, Sen. Obama “spoke about as candidly and eloquently about race as one could hope of a politician.” I would add that he did so in a way that I think does honor to the promise of his campaign of a way through, and past, our current racialized politics to a future in which race doesn’t matter. I respect him for that. The question there is, given that Sen. Obama has now acknowledged and accepted race as an issue in this campaign—something he’s largely been trying to avoid to this point (except when he could employ it backhandedly by accusing the Clintons of “playing the race card”)—and thus consigned post-racial politics to the future, rather than seeking to embody them in the present, what will that do to his prospects? At this point, I don’t think anyone can do more than guess.There are probably those (though I haven’t seen anyone yet) who will blast Sen. Obama for not disowning the Rev. Dr. Wright and cutting all ties with him. There’s no question that the Rev. Dr. Wright’s views are offensive—and not just superficially, as he counts as his theological mentor a man who wrote this:

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community. . . . Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy.

It’s hard to swallow a presidential candidate being so closely associated with someone who thinks this way; so the argument that Sen. Obama should completely estrange himself from his pastor has force. Personally, though—and yes, I’m a pastor, so I’m biased on this one—I respect him more for not doing so. The Rev. Dr. Wright brought him to Christ, brought him into church, raised him as a Christian, performed his wedding, baptized his children, discipled him across two decades, and has been his mentor and friend for most of his adult life; in my book, anyone who could take a relationship that close and that important to them and sever it for the sake of expediency would be a person of no moral character and precious little courage. Whatever anyone might think of the Rev. Dr. Wright, he deserves better than that from Barack Obama, and I’m glad he got it; and like Paul Mirengoff, I respect Sen. Obama’s courage in giving it to him. (Though, as I should have recognized, he effectively threw his grandmother under the bus for the sake of expediency, and she also deserved better from him than that; that’s a move I cannot respect.)That said, it still raises the question, which Sen. Obama didn’t answer: why is Jeremiah Wright his pastor at all? This is, after all, a relationship of choice; Barack Obama didn’t have to go to that church or develop such a deep relationship with its pastor. Why did he? One cynical explanation is that he did it to give himself credentials on the South Side, building his base for his political career. Another, which I find more compelling, is that he was looking for a sense of identity. It’s easier now to call Sen. Obama biracial, but the man’s 48 years old—when he was a kid, “biracial” wasn’t an option. He was a black boy in a white family, and he felt it; and for all that his mother was white and his father from Kenya, most white Americans would still have seen him as just another black kid. It makes sense that he would have felt the need to identify with the African-American community, and that Trinity UCC under the ministry of the Rev. Dr. Wright would have been powerfully appealing; indeed, as Kathleen Parker suggests, given the prejudices and reactions of the white grandmother who raised him, “the anger Obama heard in Rev. Wright’s church may not have felt so alien after all”—and from his speech this morning, still might not.Taken all in all, I have to think Sen. Obama helped himself with this speech. It’s always brutally difficult to give a message that you have to give and can’t afford to screw up, especially when the stakes are this high and the subject is this difficult, but given that, I think he did about as well as could be expected. The question is, is it enough? Given that even if he has sufficiently addressed concerns about his church, that still leaves his association with Tony Rezko and all the fallout that may come from that, it’s hard to say. At this point, the only thing we can be sure of is this: when they write the political science textbook on the 2008 elections, this will be another chapter.Update: if Mickey Kaus’ analysis is right—and he certainly has more of a track record than I do—then Sen. Obama may actually have hurt himself here, possibly badly.

If you look at the polls, you see that in the last week or so, John McCain has surged; where he was once clearly behind Sen. Obama and trailing Hillary Clinton as well, now he’s showing a narrow lead. Some of this is probably the ugliness that is the Eliot Spitzer story, which certainly hasn’t made the Democrats look good (and which hits Sen. Clinton harder, given her ties to him); more of it, though, is that courtesy of ABC News, America has discovered Sen. Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright Jr. Those who were paying attention knew about him already, but as with any powerful preacher (and he certainly is that), reading is one thing, seeing is something else again. The result has been to raise some serious questions about Sen. Obama and his campaign; given that so much of his appeal has been his image as a post-racial figure who can be an instrument of racial reconciliation and healing, seeing him so closely tied to a mentor who decidedly isn’t has done him serious damage. Mark Steyn, in his usual snarky fashion, has captured the reactions of many quite well.Sen. Obama, of course, is trying to distance himself from the Rev. Dr. Wright—a problematic thing when this man has been his pastor for two decades, officiating at his wedding and baptizing his children—but it may not work. Really, it shouldn’t; whatever specific words Sen. Obama may or may not have heard his pastor say, you can’t associate that closely for that long with someone of such strong character and opinions and not know what that person is made of. Or at least, anyone who could would be grossly unqualified to serve as president of this (or any) country.Unfortunately for Sen. Obama, l’affaire Wright hits harder because of the Rezko trial. Antoin “Tony” Rezko is of course a very different person from the Rev. Dr. Wright and has played a very different part in Sen. Obama’s life, but his trial has already weakened the Senator and put some cracks in his image. In particular, when Sen. Obama has been arguing that people should vote for him because “in a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters,” it really hurts him to have to turn around and say, as he did regarding Mr. Rezko, that “his private real estate transactions with Rezko involved repeated lapses of judgment” (emphasis mine); when he’s been running, essentially, on his character, the appearance of character flaws is particularly damaging. It raises the question: if, as Paul Mirengoff argues, Sen. Obama is “the quintessential self-made man,” who is he, really, at his core? The kind of people with whom he associates closely suggests that we might not like the answer; and that suggestion, if it takes root in enough people’s minds, may prove to be the one thing his campaign cannot survive.See also:
Race and the Democrats, Part III
Race and the Democrats, Part IV
The Audacity of Hate, Part One, Two, Three, Four
The Audacity of Hype