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.

Peter Finch would be proud. MSNBC Countdown host Keith Olbermann put an impassioned, cinematic/oratorical spin on his “special comment” direct address to Senator Hillary Clinton last night, stemming from Geraldine Ferraro’s comments about Senator Barack Obama only being in the position he was because he was a black man, and it was a pretty powerful thing (“Voluntarily or inadvertently, you are still awash in this filth”). Whatever you think of the man, the Democratic candidates or this controversy, Olbermann can write. And to me, his points are pretty much on point: the serpentine, surreptitious courting of casually prejudiced voters — the sort of folks who might not forward along the email touting Obama as a closet agent of Muslim, but silently nod to themselves in clucking acceptance when hearing about its reportage — has gotten a lot more advanced and, dare I say, intelligent over the years. And the Clintons don’t have their doctorates in hardball by accident. They play to win, and a vote is a vote, no matter if it’s in the positive or negative. Ergo, the Clinton campaign has been remarkably adept at maintaining plausible deniability. You can’t reasonably assign intent to any single one of these statements or controversies Olbermann addresses. But once the “pattern” cat is out of the bag… well, you’ve really irritated if not forever lost those who care most deeply and sincerely about equality, and abhor political ploys of cheap division.

The latest from the Democratic campaign trail? She’s playing a dangerous game, Hillary Clinton, but damned if she isn’t doing it with some intelligence. After playing almost exclusively nice with Barack Obama in person at the last Democratic debate — saying how “honored” she was to be sharing the stage with him — Clinton then immediately turned around and ripped into the Illinois senator on Saturday, crying “for shame!” over a piece of direct-mail correspondence from his campaign that questioned her health care plan.

OK, well played — Clinton gets that she’ll have to slug it out in the trenches if she wants to ignite a comeback, battling over issues and using contrast to decry contrasts drawn with her. Well… maybe not. In a Rhode Island campaign appearance Sunday afternoon, she mocked Obama’s hopeful rhetoric, declaring it not the answer in fighting entrenched interests. “I could stand up here and say, ‘Let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified, the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect,'” Clinton said, as people cheered and laughed. Again: bad idea, this mocking of hope and optimism, especially for a candidate whose husband ran as “a man from Hope.” I don’t doubt that Clinton has a perfectly serviceable sense of humor, but it’s been evidenced repeatedly that she’s demonstrably awful with a jab. Repeated use of this technique will unleash a world of hurt and spurned “third-way” voters, even if she were to rally and win the Democratic nomination.

Casting an eye away from the big screen, I’d hate to be the one to break this to the Clintons, but — barring some sort of top-shelf political faux pas, nay, utter flame-out, or the sudden disclosure that Barack Obama secretly funded Michael Vick’s dogfighting ring — Hillary’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for the presidency is all over but the shouting. Like a “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” novel of yesteryear, she can pick the gracefulness and specifics of her exit, but it’s no longer a “numbers game” in which she holds any sort of advantage.

Obama’s string of 10 straight primary and caucus wins, and the average, crushing margin of the victories (an astonishing 33 percent), means that Clinton would have to notch 60-plus percent of the vote in delegate-rich Texas, Pennsylvania and Ohio — unreasonable gets, to say the least. This virtually guarantees that Obama will hold a significant lead in pledged delegates, states won and total votes (of which he’s picked up one million more than Clinton since Super Tuesday) upon the completion of the main primary cycle.

Of course no politician of substance gets to where they are by just packing it in. But Clinton no longer has any semblance of an effective message to match her iron will. Initially missing the boat on the electorate’s hunger for change is one thing, but the Clinton campaign is now pursuing an equally tone deaf strategy in trying to reverse Obama’s momentum and “drive up his negatives,” in inside-the-Beltway parlance. Since her experiential trump card isn’t working, she’s taken to (understandably) ignoring voting outcomes and (less understandably) treating hope as a piñata in her recent stump speeches.

“When I think about what we’re really comparing in this election, you
know, we can’t just have speeches, we need to have solutions for America,” Clinton said in one speech in Ohio. “It is time to get real — to get real about how we actually win this
election and get real about the challenges facing America,” she said in another speech. “It’s time
that we moved from good words to good works, from sound bites to sound
solutions. Americans have a choice to make in this
election, and that choice matters. It’s about picking a president who
relies not just on words, but on work, on hard work, to get America working again for all of our people. We
need to make a choice between speeches and solutions.”

Parsing and attempting to highlight this distinction is something that requires a deft touch — a pinch of good-natured wheedling and a very conciliatory tone. Needless to say, these are not traits that Clinton possesses in abundance. Ergo, this tack, and the repeated use of the phrase “Get real” (10 times in one speech yesterday) is like dumping gasoline on a fire. It’s an argument that doesn’t really hold sway with undecided independents, and it does nothing except piss off and further agitate many of those leaning toward Obama — Democrats, so-called “Obamacans” or otherwise unaffiliated voters — because you’re essentially calling them stupid, questioning the value and judgment of their feelings. And that’s a problem, because a feeling is much stronger than a thought.

Gazing past the silver screen and into the real world, The Atlantic has up a fascinating piece by Marc Ambinder in which he assays the behind-the-scenes run-up and laid track of the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as some of their strategies and inner workings even now. It’s the rich detail of involving novels, stuff you could never really cram into a film about politics, no matter how exacting and “inside-the-Beltway.”

The article offers up a story of dueling war rooms, shrewd fund-raising battles and surprising allies (for one, the Hillary camp’s
back-channel alliance with Matt Drudge, who helped break the Monica Lewinsky story,
and rode it with an unrivaled fervor), but also very much more than that. It’s an allegorical story of plotting, entitlement, and not seeing the forest through the trees.

Clearly, Obama’s populist candidacy has threatened to upend the Clintons’ painstakingly constructed political applecart, as well as the way politicians have traditionally pursued
the presidency — through years of careful preparation and positioning. “I think there’s no doubt that it would be easier for a lot of people in
Washington if I had decided that I was going to take a pass and wait my
appropriate turn,” says Obama in the piece. “[That] might be, from their perspective, 10 years from
now — or at least once the Clintons had exhausted all possibilities of
running any further.”

The above accompanying photo, from John Gress of Reuters, actually sums it up nicely — the Clintons’ simultaneous disdain for and disbelief at Obama’s meteoric rise. (In the preparatory months leading up to Hillary’s campaign launch, they were focused on sharpening their talons to fend off the more obvious challenge by John Edwards.) Part of the grand strategy for Hillary Clinton’s run at the White House
was to build a movement around her gender and the possibility of
electing the first female president. Mark Penn, the Clinton campaign’s visionary pollster,
believed that presenting Clinton’s candidacy as a historic occasion
would re-inspire voters badly disillusioned after eight years of George
W. Bush. But Obama — the first nationally viable African-American candidate, and one possessing the charisma to enthuse potential voters about rising to make history, however implicitly — assumed the
symbolic role that Clinton’s team had in mind for her. For the full read, click here.

Whatever you think of the man and/or candidate, one has to cop to the genuine electricity in Barack Obama’s Iowa caucus victory speech last night. It’s a nicely scripted thing, and delivered with power and grace — definitely cinematic in its oratorical punch. One thing that’s notable is how inclusive and only vaguely defined his common-cause language is, talking about the day pundits “said would never come” without ever explicitly mentioning race.