As for Obama’s speech, I think it may actually hold up pretty well, historically. Obviously, much depends on what happens with the rest of his campaign and career, but it’s got the potential.

The historic parallel I first thought of was King’s Riverside speech on Vietnam.

Obviously, he must address this issue if anything else he says will be heard. But instead of trying to wish it away or, worse, attempt to disown his own heritage, he has attacked the issue head-on.

Jodi Kantor of the New York Times starts her column on the speech with this:

“Since he was very young, Senator Barack Obama has been something of a mediator of racial concerns, shuttling between black and white worlds and trying to translate the concerns of one to the other.

“He did it in his family. He did it at Harvard Law School. And on Tuesday morning, he assumed that role nationally, trying to allay voters’ concerns about statements by his pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright, and staking his presidential candidacy on his ability to explain black grievances to white people and white resentment to black people.”

Obama really does possess a unique perspective which has given him an equally unique opportunity.

Addressing Iraq and the economy so soon after today’s speech may satisfy some who said today “Ho, hum, what’s the big deal about race? Obama isn’t address problems that really matter.” But I suspect those folks aren’t looking to be satisfied by anything that Obama does. I do worry that it might be too much oratory in a single week. Maybe the goal is just to get these words and ideas out there and let them percolate while he does more ground-level stumping in the weeks ahead.

I agree entirely that he did that. And exceedingly well. As something of an Obama skeptic, I was genuinely impressed by this speech (though like a number of commentators on the other thread I felt that both his line about Israel and his knee-jerk American exceptionalism rang a bit false).

But the problem for Obama is that the point of this speech was principally not to answer hard questions directly, but to move his campaign beyond a political crisis. There were some hard questions at the heart of that crisis, and Obama answered them well. But like most political crises in our culture, much of this crisis consists not of “hard questions” but of bullshit (in the philosophical sense of the term).

To the extent that this crisis is bullshit, the speech largely doesn’t matter. The bullshitters will greet the speech with vague notions that, somehow, this speech isn’t “enough” for some unspecified group of other people (and of course, trivially, there are groups for which it will of course not be enough: e.g. hardcore racists, Republican activists, the Hillary Clinton campaign, and so forth). See, for example, Joan Walsh’s piece in Salon.com (I’d link, but I don’t want to wait for moderation): “Was Obama’s Speech Enough?” And her answer, after saying a lot of nice things about this speech, is essentially “no”…though there’s no content whatsoever to this answer. It’s just handwaving and bullshit.

At least from afar, this crisis seems much smaller than it’s been spun. Obama overwhelmingly has the delegate math in his favor. There’s just no way Clinton wins this. To the extent that there’s been a suggestion that the nomination hangs in the balance, I don’t see it. On the other hand, Obama could emerge from this nomination fight as a profoundly damaged candidate. And this crisis was about that. Like I’ve already said, I think he’s handled it exceedingly well.

But whether or not the bullshit aspect of this crisis continues is, in a sense, out of Obama’s control.