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.