The verdict is in, UPDATE: Krauthammer: A brilliantly conceived fauilure

The media love Obama's speech. In other news, the sun rose this morning in the east, expected to set in the west.



Saturday Night Live should have fun with this one.

UPDATE: Be sure not to miss Charles Krauthammer's take on this. "Rubbish" is his key word.



UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson - the tragedy of Obama's speech

Race, identity politics ripping apart Democratic Party

The Democratic Party is flailing. What once looked to be a sure thing -- a Dem win in November -- now could be in doubt as the Party wrangles with the issue of race. A Pew Research media study shows that the race issue has dominated the headlines recently. Bizarrely, Spitzer's "Client 9" prostitution scandal has been the Democrats' only saving grace as it competed for national media attention with the race issue.

Even coverage of election results was racially tinged last week. A Chicago Tribune analysis of Obama's Mississippi victory, posted on Google News, noted that exit polls in that state revealed a "race-based resistance" to Obama, with "white Democrats there rejecting his candidacy 70 percent to 26 percent, while 9 of 10 blacks voted for him. It's a dramatic reflection of a recurrent pattern most pronounced in the South," The Tribune reported. Noting concerns that black voters were offended by Clinton's suggestion that Obama be her vice president, the March 13 Los Angeles Times reported on warnings that African-Americans could stay at home in November if Clinton won the nomination.

Against that backdrop came the Ferraro and Wright flare ups, which simmered for days. By mid-week, Clinton had repudiated Ferraro's remarks in front of a group of black newspaper publishers and had her surrogates spreading the message as well. During an Oct. 13 appearance on MSNBC, Congressman Gregory Meeks, an African-American Clinton supporter, told Tucker Carlson that "clearly the statements that Geraldine Ferraro made [are] a distraction and should not have been made. They're inaccurate."

Before the dust had settled came the Wright brouhaha. On March 14, Fox News' Hannity & Colmes aired video of Wright sermons that included remarks harshly critical of the U.S. and its treatment of blacks. (At one point, he described the country as "the U.S. of K.K.K.A..") Fox then aired an interview in which Obama said he had not been aware of many of those statements, and added that "I reject them completely. They are not ones that reflect my values or my ideals."

The study goes on to cite a NY Times story last week that highlights the growing anxiety of the Party's power brokers. "Lacking a clear route to the selection of a Democratic presidential nominee, the party's uncommitted superdelegates say they are growing increasingly concerned about the risks of a prolonged fight between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, and perplexed about how to resolve the conflict," writes the Times.

The Democrat chickens are coming home to roost. After decades of playing the race card, the gender card and identity politics Democrats are getting a taste of their own medicine. And it is bitter indeed.

These sentiments won't help end Wrightgate

This is totally anecdotal, but if reporters scour Obama audiences and find more reactions like the one Byron York found, Wrightgate will continue to have legs. Here is York interviewing an Obama supporter today at the big speech on race. York probed where most MSM'ers probably won't, and what he finds is scary:

“It was amazing,” Gregory Davis, a financial adviser and Obama supporter from Philadelphia, told me. “I think he addressed the issue, and if that does not address the issue, I don’t know what else can be said about it. That was just awesome oratory.”

I asked Davis what his personal reaction was when he saw video clips of sermons in which Rev. Wright said, “God damn America,” called the United States the “U.S. of KKK A,” and said that 9/11 was “America’s chickens… coming home to roost.” “As a member of a traditional Baptist, black church, I wasn’t surprised,” Davis told me. “I wasn’t offended by anything the pastor said. A lot of things he said were absolutely correct…. The way he said it may not have been the most appropriate way to say it, but as far as a typical black inner-city church, that’s how it’s said.”

UPDATE: Conn Carroll adds:

The real news out of Obama’s speech is not that he is a gifted speaker; we already knew that. No, the real stories are that Obama changed his story yet again about his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and what Obama’s long association with him says about his judgment.

Read Conn's whole post. He explains himself well.

Obama's race speech

Here is a video of Obama's much-ballyhooed speech today.



After the warm fuzzy glow wears off, read Allahpundit's total evisceration of the remarks.

This passage from the speech in particular annoyed me:

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks 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. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, 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.

OK, so let me get this straight. If I am bothered by the fact that Obama planted his rear in the pews of a church whose pastor spews hatred and ignorance for two decades then I am against solving problems in this country? If I let my mind wonder why Obama never left this church or spoke out publicly against Wright's incendiary rhetoric -- or if I think that this lack of action on Obama's behalf speaks to his character, then I am against more jobs for Americans? I don't want to solve the health care crisis? I am for the status quo education system? Talk about a guilt trip!

Shouldn't Obama be the one who feels guilty about all this? Not us?

Obama the "bargainer"

In this morning's Wall Street Journal Shelby Steele argues that Barack Obama is a "bargainer." "Bargaining," according to Steele, enables white Americans to feel at ease -- absolved even -- with regard to America's past sin. Barack the "bargainer" wears a mask that comforts many. "Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him," writes Steele. "And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence."

More Steele:

Because he is black, there is a sense that profound questions stand to be resolved in the unfolding of his political destiny. And, as the Clintons have discovered, it is hard in the real world to run against a candidate of destiny. For many Americans -- black and white -- Barack Obama is simply too good (and too rare) an opportunity to pass up. For whites, here is the opportunity to document their deliverance from the shames of their forbearers. And for blacks, here is the chance to document the end of inferiority. So the Clintons have found themselves running more against America's very highest possibilities than against a man. And the press, normally happy to dispel every political pretension, has all but quivered before Mr. Obama. They, too, have feared being on the wrong side of destiny.

And yet, in the end, Barack Obama's candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton's or Jesse Jackson's. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were "challengers," not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin.

But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don't know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . ." And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama's Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a "blank screen."

Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America").

How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

Juan Williams delivers damning Obama indictment

Look for the nutroots to loose it on Juan Williams after this very pointed criticism of Barack Obama.

Click the image to the right to watch Williams -- a liberal commentator -- tell it like it is with regard to Obama's relationship with his incendiary, race-baiting pastor.