Tuesday, March 18, 2008

About Obama's Speech   [Mark Hemingway]

...it was in many respects excellent. I thought the first third of the speech was not so good in that that he offered up too much stark racial context before he got to the part about addressing Wright. But once he got wound up, he spoke about as candidly and eloquently about race as one could hope of a politician.

Now that said, I think the speech could be a disaster. Race isn't easy to address — it required Obama to be extremely nuanced and offer up very complex arguments. Very few people are actually going to watch or read this speech all the way through. I'm not sure there's any ten second takeaways from the speech that will be replayed on cable news that will pacify voters or give a sense of what the speech was really about.

Further, no matter how eloquent he is here, the ENTIRE speech is about race. The reason why Obama has done so well to date is his ability to get beyond rehashing the same struggles and arguments with regard to race. Now everybody is going to spend weeks talking about the state of racial injustice in this country in response — pretty much the exact opposite of the discussion about unity he's been fostering so far — and that's a serious distraction that doesn't benefit Obama's candidacy. 

03/18 11:42 AMShare