Speech doesn't pander; does it explain?

By: Roger Simon
March 18, 2008 02:36 PM EST

Barack Obama spoke calmly and reasonably Tuesday about a subject that often lacks both calm and reason in America: race.

Obama’s speech was temperate and built on logic, not fiery or built on passion. It was meant to be calming.

It was a speech that attempted to connect the dots of race in American history from slavery to Jim Crow to black anger, to white fear, to, ultimately, the hope of reconciliation. Where it was strongest was in appealing to the better angels of the American spirit: the notion that we can all come together.

Where it was weakest was in explaining the very reason for the speech: how the inflammatory, even repugnant, comments of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are understandable.

Wright, who has been Obama’s pastor for 20 years, has said America had brought on the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — “America’s chickens are coming home to roost” — and that “We started the AIDS virus.”

Without citing such statements specifically, Obama sought to explain them, though he first condemned them. Speaking in slow, measured tones, Obama said Wright used “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.”

But, for the first time, Obama admitted what he previously had denied: that he was present when Wright had made some of his outrageous comments.

“Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church?” Obama said. “Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely — just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.”

Obama did not say, however, that he had ever expressed his disagreement to Wright or in any way attempted to get Wright to moderate or change his views.

Instead, Obama said Wright was “more than snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and YouTube.”

Obama mentioned once again that Wright was a “Marine” and “has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country” and has spent his time “housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.”

Obama also said, in effect, that some white people simply don’t get black churches.

“They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear,” Obama said. “The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and, yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.”

It was the key to his speech and his toughest sell: that the black experience in America has been different from the white experience and that white people have to expect the “bitterness and bias” of black people while recognizing their own history of white racism.

Obama encapsulated that within his own family by speaking of his white grandmother, “a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

The speech was also, in part, the speech of a constitutional law professor building a case.

“We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country,” Obama said. “But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.”

If Obama was not attempting to excuse the statements of Wright, he was certainly attempting to put them in context.

“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,” he said.

But Obama also attempted to explain white resentment by saying that when white Americans “are told to bus their children to a school across town, when they hear that an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed, when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.”

And although the speech was not interrupted by applause very many times, Obama’s attack on some in the media was greeted that way. “Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism,” he said as the audience clapped.

But Obama said that things could get better and that his running for president was a sign that things had gotten better and that the races in America could join together in a common goal.

“The profound mistake of Rev. Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society,” Obama said, “it’s that he spoke as if our society was static, as if no progress has been made, as if this country — a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black, Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.”

That, of course, is what the Hillary Clinton campaign resents the most about the Obama campaign: that he uses race politically. That he says a vote for him is a sign that America’s racial healing has begun.

In the end, Obama’s speech was about hope and redemption, and there was no doubt who was supplying the hope and who was the redeemer.

“This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected,” Obama said. “And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation — the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.”

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=C2EC88D8-3048-5C12-0003A7A1BE877D47
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My bold and highlighted.