Stringing together all those verbs is not illuminating. I would say he was…

…“defending” his relationship with the preacher while criticizing Wright’s thinking and disavowing some of his sermons…

…“justifying” his own membership of the Trinity United congregation in whose pulpit those words were spoken…

…“explaining” the race-based bitterness of an historical mindset that could produce sermons that are now clearly anachronistic, divisive and counterproductive…

…“embracing” Wright himself as one would embrace a member of one’s family, prejudices and all.

The discourse of the African-American church, Obama explains “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 biases that make up the black experience in America.”

And Professor Rosen, I know you are “getting out of this one” but before you do, I quibble with your comment to Jarvis that his disagreement with Obama’s decision not to leave his church is “a totally legitimate disagreement.” As we have gone back and forth in BuzzMachine’s earlier thread Obama Explains, this disagreement comes disquietingly close to an unConstitutional religious test for political office and is therefore not legitimate in our secular republic.

But when people heard the soundbites, they started attacking Obama. The attacks hurt his chance to win the nomination. So he felt he needed to explain his relationship to Wright. The explanation is complicated and steeped in the murky and opaque attitudes of minorities and whites. So he decided to give a speech and try to talk about it.

He did. He gave a speech that shone a bright light into the dark cave of race relations, PC speech, suspicion and confusion about what people really think about each other. And he didn’t defend Wright’s words, but he did explain why he was close to the man.

You can say, he should have never been close to the man because of the words the Wright spoke. But the explanation itself is so sharp, so accurate that you shouldn’t dismiss it. Obama’s speech is brilliant because it opened something that whites really don’t want to talk about it. And maybe blacks don’t either. I don’t know because I’m not black and I’m not privvy to conversations that take place about race in their community.

I know, though, that in the place I used to live, outside a big Midwestern city in a blue state, the liberal white moms supported affirmative action, were pro-choice, etc. But when the school district wanted to change the lines to bring more minorities into the school, they fought hard. They used the code word of “class size” as the weapon, rather than saying out loud that they didn’t want a few poor, blacks to go to school with their kids.

That’s what Obama is talking about.

Re HuffPo: I’m not sure why anyone would want to be a newspaper. See David Carr’s column today.

Saying “you’re dead wrong” isn’t an argument, or an attempt at argument, Jeff. It’s just signaling to you how I feel. I don’t understand why that’s so insulting. I think you are wrong for supporting “old politics” Hillary, too. So what?

I don’t have anything special to add parsing Obama’s speech, which is a political speech and therefore has many overlapping motives. But like many others I noticed that it isn’t your typical “distance yourself from…” speech, even though that’s part of what he is doing. What Alan Wolfe said at The Plank says it for me.

I’m done with this subject, but you should do a post on whether the The Huffington Post actually is, as its tag line now says, “The Internet Newspaper.” ( “The Internet Newspaper: News, Blogs, Video, Community.”) See Romenesko today on it.

Also, what’s up with the conflation of “explain” and “justify?” That’s shouting heads logic, that’s thirty-second ad stuff. Why do that?

Exactly. You are no fan of political correctness. And because you disagree with Obama’s decision not to leave his church–a totally legitimate disagreement– you are missing one of the most interesting things about his speech, which is that it’s the greatest blow to racial PC ever undertaken by an American politician.

Obama said black Americans ought to be “binding our particular grievances – for better healthcare, and better schools, and better jobs – to the larger aspirations of all Americans.” If that isn’t your politics, I don’t know what is, Jeff. (Which of course is possible.) The whole thrust of political correctness is the opposite way: never forget the particular grievances.

The argument that Caldwell is making you did not grasp.

He’s not saying PC speech is the fault of white people and Wright is the antidote to all that. He’s saying that the kind of paranoia represented by some of Wright’s more lurid suggestions has a connection to the “speaking in code” that settled over polite discourse, public discourse after it became difficult for whites to talk about racial differences without sounding racist. He’s saying PC speech isn’t believable to black Americans, either. They don’t believe it represents what white people really think. (Are they wrong?) But since that’s all they hear–PC plus code words that attempt to get around PC–they have to imagine what the real feelings are, beneath the gobbledygook. And that is part of the paranoia. Cause of? No. Excuse for? No again.

Obama actually took this whole structure on and gave it a big shove. You should be cheering that. Caldwell:

The US has not managed to eliminate racism, [yet] it has succeeded in eliminating racist talk. Remarks the slightest bit “insensitive” draw draconian punishment. White people, because they feel thoroughly oppressed by this regime, assume that it must be some kind of “gift” to minorities, especially blacks.

It is not. It is more like a torment. It renders the power structure more opaque to blacks than it has ever been, leaving what Mr Jackson calls a “scary disconnect between the specifics of what gets said and the hazy possibilities of what kinds of things are truly meant”.

The very dialog that has burst forth from Obama’s speech showed that it lessened some of the oppression of the linguistic regime we have been caught within. It’s hard for me to believe that your free speech self cannot see that.

“Wrong” is such a shallow, simplistic word. It’s a pillow thrown.

“Wrong”? That’s the sort of one-dimensional language Caldwell himself dismisses, a kind of political incorrectness: “You are wrong, which makes me right.”

I find Caldwell’s column a bit dizzying, for he blames careful speech, inoffensive speech, a dismissal of hate speech, political correctness — judge it as you will — on white people and praises Obama for defending Wright’s intemperate language — well, except the worst of it — as the antidote.

Mind you, I am no fan of political correctness. I am, after all, a fan of Howard Stern’s; he’s my intemperate one. I agree with Caldwell that far: that we need to cut through the fog and have an honest and direct discussion.

But Wright is no model of progressive tolerance, any more than is Falwell or Robertson.

This story is about many things. It is about religion; that is another discussion. It is about company kept and advisers heard. It is about language, indeed. It is about racism. It is about history. It is also about views of Obama — his own and others’ — as the son of a black man or a white woman or as the multicultural American and the significance of each. It is about allegiances and loyalties and priorities. It is about rhetoric and meaning. It is about media coverage. It is about so much. “Wrong” doesn’t do the discussion justice.

If Obama gave a different speech there would still be criticism. If he was to blow smoke, everyone would complain about him being able to talk a good game with no action.

Accept my apology for demanding at least a master’s thesis from you on this Saturday afternoon, if not quite a book. I mean that sincerely, not tongue in cheek.

I respect Eric Deggans’ journalism in this area. I happen to be an occasional source when he writes on television news. It was his nuance that inspired my convoluted inquiry to you.

Your reply is, I think, on point: “I don’t think I need to convince you that Wright’s language is divisive. Barack Obama has called it divisive.”

I find “divisive” a subtler, calmer and more accurate description than your earlier “racism is racism and I believe it should be condemned.” The point of my rather pompous question was to find a way to mitigate that former, blunter formulation.

As an atheist to a Christian, allow me to wish you the blessings of the season in the hope of understanding, tolerance, reconciliation — and life renewed.

Cheers — Andrew

That said, I think your choice of words in the very first sentence, “worshipful”, is the thing that makes me most uneasy about this man. He should represent everything I’m looking for in a presidential candidate, he’s smart, insightful, engaging, articulate, moral, and charismatic. But instead, I find the aura of worship that has materialized around him, this “cult of Obama”, to be sort of scary. There seems to be an appetite among Democrats to anoint a saviour. To find someone who will weave such a dazzling vision of peace and stability and unity that, like desert wanderers dying of thirst, we will flock to him to drink the KoolAid. And anyone (including other Democrats) who challenges this saviour is a spoiler who must be stopped. I would like to think that both Democratic candidates have strengths that should be carefully and reasonably evaluated as we make decisions. I would prefer not to have a preference for Hilary be considered heretical.

But not seeing race is actually white racism, to some extent. Because whites like me have benefited from years of the benefits of being white in the US. And while I don’t like affirmative action, I also understand that growing up black, and being a black adult in America means having an experience vastly different from my own. To not see that, to turn away from that truth, is to engage in a subtle and somewhat unconcious form of racism. I affirm my goodness by being colorblind, and at the same time engage in racism by being unwilling to see that race and racism are a big part of what is at work in the US.

I am also a woman, and I agree with all the research that says of all disadvantaged groups, white women have had the best deal under affirmative action. White women have done very well in comparison to men and women of color. Without question. We outnumber men in college and graduate school. We outnumber both male and female minorities in same. Women who follow the exact same career trajectory as men (meaning no time out for childrearing, no parttime jobs, etc, same grueling path to the top) make as much money as their male counterparts. (Most women wisely opt out of that grind.)

While I don’t care for some of what Rev. Wright says, I understand that he says it in a context many whites may not fully grasp. And clearly, the soundbites played on the news and on Fox, ripped out of the rest of sermon, are not reflective of what he meant entirely.