The Maverick Tribe

Obama's speech today was honest and brave.  While Mitt Romney's "I'm a Mormon, but I play a Christian on TV" speech was politically shrewd and packed with horseshit ("Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom", "I saw my father march with Martin Luther King", and so on), Obama's speech on race relations was the reverse.  It was raw and personal and politically hazardous.

Obama is an idealist.  No, he's not an idealist about policy.  He's even more naive than that.  He is an idealist about politics.  He founded his campaign on the belief that he could rescue our politics from the petty, cynical course set in motion by the Roves and Clintons and Atwaters of the world.  And, like any idealist, he has not always lived up to his own ideals.  Under what I am sure is enormous pressure to go conventional, he has occasionally indulged in some of the cheap shots and predictable tactics of his rivals during the course of this long campaign.  Especially in recent weeks, I could feel my own high expectations and confidence in him flagging.  Maybe he really is just a conventional politician?

Today's speech showed that he isn't, and it reasserted the idealism and authenticity of his campaign.  Obama was forced into answering up to questions about his ties to Reverend Wright, a terrain that he would rather not have to defend.  But he was faced with a choice.  He could give a perfectly acceptable speech, a product of professional advisers, with an address to the concerns of those working class whites, so prized in Pennsylvania at the moment, as its centerpiece.  Or he could choose the riskier option, and give a speech that was uniquely his own, facing up to all the uncomfortable shortcomings and resentments and paranoia on both sides of the racial divide.  And he chose the latter, because that's who he is, and being who he is got him this far.

The ostensible objective of this speech was twofold:  to put the Rev. Wright controversy to rest and to allay the suspicions of those key demographics into which Obama wants to make headway.  I'm not sure he entirely succeeded on either front.  Some, myself included, will continue object to his level of tolerance and closeness to a pastor capable of such vile and irresponsible remarks.  Did Obama ever confront Wright over his demagoguery or did he just dismiss it as the ramblings of an ornery old uncle?  It's a question that matters, and Obama didn't give an answer.  I think this speaks to one of his flaws.

But Obama did achieve something more fundamental.  He reestablished the basis of his campaign as a next generation political movement, a campaign that was beginning to look tired.  And he did it on the basis for which Obama has the most authority:  race.  And so the conversation has begun.