I’ve talked before about his cinematic oratorical punch, and in a riveting, landmark speech on racial division today in Philadelphia, Senator Barack Obama tackled head-on the incendiary statements of his former pastor that have been dominating recent headlines — rejecting the content of his divisive statements, but diagnosing a generations-long “racial stalemate” with personally felt clarity, civility and clear-eyed perspicacity. “I can no more disown [Reverend Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown the black community,” Obama said. “I can no more disown him than I can my 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.”



Sometimes honesty meets challenge, but very rarely, it seems, in the political sphere. Cannily dialing down his affected and slightly exaggerated preacher’s cadence — doubtless a source of discomfort anyway for some unswayed downmarket white voters — in a sign of deference to the subject matter, Obama spoke difficult truths to both blacks and whites alike, perhaps in a way for which he alone on the national scene is uniquely qualified, but certainly in a way that was brave.

Nuanced, shaded and roundly unpatronizing, it was a speech that, radically, acknowledges such a thing as fair reaction, and then makes a case for hard-work healing and higher discourse. Part of the home-stretch wrap comes via this assertion: “For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, conflict and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle, as we did in the O.J. trial, or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina. Or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies. We can do that. But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.”

In talking about inequalities passed along from earlier generations, Obama strings together grievances, anger and fear, connecting the dots of the unspoken and obvious in a manner that is at once breathtaking and infuriating — the latter because it makes you realize, if there were any doubt, just how much of the political oxygen is self-serving, power-grab pap. I don’t need to read or hear Senator Hillary Clinton’s response to know that she just got H-bombed, in this news cycle and for many to come. Just the little picture of her on MSNBC and other news sites — with the blurbed, lift-quote phrase “It’s an important topic,” from her deemed-necessary response — tells you everything you need to know. Clinton is a politician to her core. Shrewd, intelligent and a master of her craft, yes, but a politician nonetheless — someone who never could or would lean forward into incoming fire like this, and deliver a heartfelt, unblinking call for unity and elevation. That is the opposite of her essence, which is brokerage and willful division. For more, the full text of Obama’s speech is available here.