Morning News: 'A More Perfect Union'

From the Washington Post:

Yesterday morning, in what may be remembered as a landmark speech regardless of who becomes the next president, Obama established new parameters for a dialogue on race in America that might actually lead somewhere -- that might break out of the sour stasis of grievance and countergrievance, of insensitivity and hypersensitivity, of mutual mistrust.

"My goal was to try to lift up some truth that people talk about privately but don't always talk about publicly between the races," Obama told me in a telephone interview later in the day. He delivered his speech, titled "A More Perfect Union," in Philadelphia just yards from Independence Hall.

... "What was fascinating over the last three or four days was to see how Reverend Wright's admittedly offensive comments . . . were packaged in sound bites in a way that didn't contribute to understanding between black and white Americans but only expanded the chasm between them," [Obama] said. "I thought it was both a challenge and an opportunity to use this moment to describe, to black and white, why there is this chasm."

And that may have been the most significant aspect of the speech: the fact that Obama proposed a conversation, not a monologue. He not only laid out the reasons some African Americans might feel alienated or resentful but also the reasons some white Americans might feel the same way.

... This amounts to a new set of talking points for a discussion about race: Don't be paralyzed by history but acknowledge its effects. Recognize that whites have legitimate grievances that are not racist. Don't cling to victimhood as an all-purpose excuse. Accept personal responsibility.

Obama told me that he doesn't intend to make race a major theme of his campaign. "I don't think that we are going to be gnawing on this bone at every stop," he said. But I believe he might have pulled off something that seemed almost impossible: He not only ventured into the minefield of race and made it back alive, but he also marked a path for the rest of us to follow.

From the Washington Post:

Sen. Barack Obama's mission in Philadelphia yesterday was to put the controversy over inflammatory statements made by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., his spiritual mentor and pastor for 20 years, behind him. But Mr. Obama (D-Ill.) went deeper than that. He used his address as a teachable moment, one in which he addressed the pain, anger and frustration of generations of blacks and whites head-on -- and offered a vision of how those experiences could be surmounted, if not forgotten. It was a compelling answer both to the challenge presented by his pastor's comments and to the growing role of race in the presidential campaign.

... Mr. Obama's speech was an extraordinary moment of truth-telling. He coupled it with an appeal that this year's campaign not be dominated by distorted and polarizing debates about whether he or his opponents agree with extreme statements by supporters -- or other attempts to divide the electorate along racial lines. Far better, he argued, that Americans of all races recognize they face common economic, social and security problems.

... [Mr. Obama] was eloquent in describing the persistent challenge of race and racism in American society -- and was right in proposing that this year's campaign rise above "a politics that breeds division and conflict and cynicism."

From the Los Angeles Times:

Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia on "A More Perfect Union" was that rarity in American political discourse: a serious discussion of racial division, distrust and demonization ... [that] redefines our national conversation about race and politics and lays down a challenge to the cynical use of the "race card."

... Obama conceded that some of the crasser remarks by [some his and Senator Clinton's] supporters "reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through -- a part of our union that we have yet to perfect." That is undeniably true and refreshingly honest. No single speech will recalibrate America's consideration of race and politics, but we are closer today, thanks to this remarkable address, to facing our history and perfecting our nation.

From the Los Angeles Times:

"That was the most sophisticated speech on race and politics I've ever heard," said CNN's Bill Schneider, the only network pundit who actually has taught American political history at elite universities.

... No candidate for national office has ever spoken so candidly or realistically about race as it is lived as a fact of life in America. As he put it Tuesday, "The profound mistake of Rev. Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country ... is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past."

From the New York Times:

In a speech whose frankness about race many historians said could be likened only to speeches by Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, Senator Barack Obama, speaking across the street from where the Constitution was written, traced the country's race problem back to not simply the country's "original sin of slavery" but the protections for it embedded in the Constitution.

Yet the speech was also hopeful, patriotic, quintessentially American — delivered against a blue backdrop and a phalanx of stars and stripes. Mr. Obama invoked the fundamental values of equality of opportunity, fairness, social justice. He confronted race head-on, then reached beyond it to talk sympathetically about the experiences of the white working class and the plight of workers stripped of jobs and pensions.

"As far as I know, he's the first politician since the Civil War to recognize how deeply embedded slavery and race have been in our Constitution," said Paul Finkelman, a professor at Albany Law School who has written extensively about slavery, race and the Constitution. "That's a profoundly important thing to say. But what's important about the way he said it is he doesn't use this as a springboard for anger or for frustration. He doesn't say, 'O.K., slavery was bad, therefore people are owed something.' This is not a reparations speech. This is a speech about saying it's time for the nation to do better, to form a more perfect union."

... Julian Bond, the longtime civil rights activist, said the speech moved him to tears. Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, said he believed the speech would "go down as one of the great, magnificent and moving speeches in the American political tradition."

"I hear so many people saying we want a national conversation on race but it's never quite worked," he said. "He was able to do this in one speech. But he was able to do it in a nonpartisan way in that he saw both sides."

From the Chicago Sun Times:

On Tuesday morning, Barack Obama delivered the speech of his life about the most divisive issue in America in this day or any day -- race. He spoke for millions of Americans of good will and open minds -- Americans who have struggled to find just these words -- challenging us to heal our painful racial wounds by first admitting the deep roots, complexities and truths of our grievances. The grievances of black America are not imaginary, he said. And the anger and frustrations within segments of the white community cannot always be dismissed as bigotry.

... Until all of us come to understand this more tangled truth about race in America and "work through" it, as Obama said, we will never seriously take on the great problems that trouble us all.

"If we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners," Obama said, "we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education or the need to find good jobs for every American."

... It was a moving moment in American history to hear a man who could be president dissect the rancorous matter of race with such candor, and it called to mind other piercing addresses by the likes of FDR, Kennedy and King.

... Running for president inevitably is an act of self-revelation, and with this speech Obama peeled off many more layers and revealed something close to his true essence. He is the man in the middle, bi-racial and bi-cultural, inclined by both nurture and nature to understand if not always forgive both sides. He rightly denounced the many offensive comments by Rev. Wright, yet he refused to disown Wright or his overall message of self-determination.

... Obama on Tuesday spoke to our better angels.

And maybe America moved a little.

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