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Sen. Barack Obama delivered a speech on race in America Tuesday before a friendly crowd in Philadelphia. Obama had hoped to stop his freefall in opinion polls caused by a reaction to the publicity surrounding the inflammatory sermons of his mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The Illinois senator scored high on Chris Matthews' "tingle meter" evoking a comparison to Abraham Lincoln. Other gushing Old Media talking heads suggested oratory on par with Dr. Martin Luther King. I'm going to go all Simon Cowell here and say that Obama's speech was rather average as oratory. It was simply not moving and inspirational....

Barack Obama took the stage this morning to give what was billed as a "major speech on race." It was, of course, an attempt to rescue his campaign from the revelation that his so-called spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, espouses a virulently anti-American and antiwhite worldview called "black liberation theology." <--snip--> What Obama is evading is that this "profoundly distorted view" is not just some passing emotion. It is what Wright himself, in the "talking points" page of his congregation's Web site, describes as "systematized black liberation theology." As we noted yesterday, Wright credits James Cone of New York's...

Obama's speech was thoughtful, history-rich, deftly composed and, in parts, refreshingly candid about racial divides in America and the sources of those divides. However, he spoke as if he was an innocent bystander to the history he recounted. Obama discussed our nation's failings as though he was powerless to act previously or presently. Obama lamented, "Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students." That is true. Although...

Barack Obama, Victor Davis Hanson, and a few others on his response.

Thank God for Barack Obama. For until his "More Perfect Union" speech last Tuesday, it seems it never occurred to anyone that America needed to talk about race. "Maybe this'll be the beginning of a conversation," Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan proclaimed on "Meet the Press." According to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, just the fact of Obama's address proves that a "national dialogue on race" is "essential." The Chicago Tribune reported that "many voters, black and white, say they were moved by Obama's speech ... which they see as a long-awaited invitation to begin an honest, calm...

March 27, 2008, 0:00 a.m. God Bless AmericaThe speech Obama could have given. By Victor Davis Hanson Had Sen. Barack Obama (D., Ill.) said the following words in his speech last week on race in America, his problems with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, would probably now be over: “You have all heard the racist and anti-American outbursts of my pastor Rev. Wright. They are all inexcusable. His speeches have forced me to reexamine my long association with Trinity United Church of Christ. And so it is with regret that I must now leave that church. “I had...

Barack Obama's speech last week addressing his 20-year relationship with his radical pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was very well done, yet unconvincing. Obama sought to explain that relationship and why he could not end this close association, despite the minister's hate-filled rhetoric. He said, "There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Rev. Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?" Yes, those are the questions that people are asking. Many of Rev. Wright's incendiary statements are on videos sold by his church. Minister...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sometimes touted as a contender for the Republican vice-presidential slot, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has aired her thoughts on race in the United States, a prominent issue in the presidential election campaign. Rice, the top ranking African-American in President George W. Bush's cabinet, told The Washington Times she had watched Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama's major speech on race last week. "I think it was important that he (Obama) gave it for a whole host of reasons," said Rice in a transcript of the interview released by the State Department on Friday. Obama would be...

Jonah Goldberg puts his tongue firmly in his cheek:Thank God for Barack Obama. Until his “More Perfect Union” speech last Tuesday, it seems it never occurred to anyone that America needed to talk about race. “Maybe this’ll be the beginning of a conversation,” Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan proclaimed on Meet the Press. The Chicago Tribune reported that “many voters, black and white, say they were moved by Obama’s speech ... which they see as a long-awaited invitation to begin an honest, calm national dialogue about race.” Newspaper editorial boards agree. In the words of the San Diego Union-Tribune:...

Barack Obama's "More Perfect Union" speech of March 18 was a transpicuous opprobrium intended to obfuscate, shift blame and cast all churchdom in the same light as his mentor and pastor. In reality, his speech provided us with a closer look into Obama the man, and suffice it to say, he came up woefully lacking. In his speech, Obama called slavery America's original sin. I beg to differ on strict theological grounds (of which he and/or his mentor/pastor are welcome to debate me). America's original sin is the same as original sin has been from the beginning – it was...

Even as Barack Obama’s speech on race Tuesday morning was being widely hailed for its candor on a subject about which Americans—and, it must be said, especially liberal Americans—are notoriously less than candid, it strived to set, and limit, the terms of this long overdue conversation. Yes, Obama acknowledged, there is vast miscommunication between the races, a constant misreading of signals and intent. Things get said on both sides that, while regrettable, aren’t meant precisely as they may sound to ears of a different color. Obama readily admitted that his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, as a man who came of age...

Maybe, just maybe, it’s now worth at least asking whether Hillary Clinton might wind up as the Democratic candidate for vice president. When the chatter about a Democratic “dream ticket” began last year, it was easy to dismiss. Either Clinton or Obama would win a clear victory in the primaries and, after what inevitably would be a contentious campaign, each would want as little to do with the other as possible. Clinton, if she emerged victorious, would instead choose some kind of national security graybeard to her political right, a retired general perhaps, or maybe even a Republican. Likewise, Obama...

In some ways, Barack Obama's speech on race last week was as brilliant as it was nuanced. But for all its rhetorical beauty, it was also an enormous step backward and, in the end, a rather self-serving call for more discussion about racial grievance in a country that has already done way too much talking. Until last week, so much of Obama's appeal lay in the fact that he was not asking us to talk about the racial divide. Instead, he offered himself as a living and breathing symbol of racial reconciliation; his very origins pointed to the goal of...

When Democrats contemplate the apocalypse these days, they have visions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slugging it out à la Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter at the 1980 convention. The campaign's current trajectory is, in fact, alarmingly similar to the one that produced that disastrous affair. Back then, Carter had built up a delegate lead with early wins in Iowa, New Hampshire, and several Southern states. But, as the primary season dragged on, Kennedy began pocketing big states and gaining momentum. Once all the voting ended and Kennedy came up short, he eyed the New York convention as a...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Barack Obama's speech last week, hastily prepared to extinguish the firestorm over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, won critical praise for style and substance but failed politically. By elevating the question of race in America, the front-running Democratic presidential candidate has deepened the dilemma created by his campaign's success against the party establishment's anointed choice, Hillary Clinton. In rejecting the racist views of his longtime spiritual mentor but not disowning him, Obama has unwittingly enhanced his image as the African-American candidate -- not just a remarkable candidate who happens to be black. That poses a racial dilemma for...

It is a tribute to Hillary Clinton that even though, rationally, political soothsayers think she can no longer win, irrationally, they wonder how she will pull it off. It's impossible to imagine The Terminator, as a former aide calls her, giving up. Unless every circuit is out, she'll regenerate enough to claw her way out of the grave, crawl through the Rezko Memorial Lawn and up Obama's wall, hurl her torso into the house and brutally haunt his dreams. "It's like one of those movies where you think you know the end, but then you watch with your fingers over...

Hello, Hillary? Hate to wake you, but it's 3 o'clock in the morning, and we have a real crisis. It's your campaign, senator. It's Hail Mary time. You've lost the bid for a revote in Florida and, it seems, in Michigan, which means your prospects for prevailing over Barack Obama in the primary popular vote by June are vanishing fast. The Illinois senator, meanwhile, has just delivered a JFK-like speech on race in America--a savvy move that may well have stanched the hemorrhaging of his campaign over the controversial remarks made by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. The mood could be...

Even though Barack Obama has "moved on" from the messy association that he has recently been forced to explain to man who had been his pastor for 20 years, it is clear - the voters haven't. There are legitimate questions being raised about a relationship that spans a generation and the beliefs of a man who has on multiple dozens of occasions issued some of the most vitriolic, bigoted, racism imaginable in America today. No doubt one of the most infamous video moments recently unearthed was Jeremiah Wright's use of what he cleverly believed to be a cute play on...

WASHINGTON -It is already easy to imagine the Republican attack ads against Barack Obama. They open with video of his wife, Michelle, saying she was proud of America "for the first time in my adult lifetime" because of her husband's presidential candidacy. Cut to the Illinois Senator explaining that he doesn't wear an American flag lapel pin because it is a "substitute for true patriotism." Then flash a clip of Obama explaining that his Caucasian grandmother was a "typical white person" because she uttered racial epithets and was afraid of black people. Finally, the coup de grace, pictures of Obama's...

Click on link to read WaPo arab writer suggesting Obama's speech can be applied to terrorists too.

The Christian Century Magazine News March 25, 2008 IRS probes appearance by Obama at UCC convention The Internal Revenue Service has notified the United Church of Christ that it has opened an investigation into possible "political activities" connected with Senator Barack Obama's speech at the denomination's national convention last year. UCC president John H. Thomas termed the investigation "disturbing," but said that church officials took great care to see that Obama's appearance at the UCC General Synod meeting last June in Hartford, Connecticut, "met appropriate legal and moral standards." Engaging in partisan political acts can endanger a church body's tax-exempt...

Some Topics thus far on Kudlow's show today which has the theme of resurrection McCain is benefitting most from Obama's slide. Current guests John Tamny and Jimmy P Is bailout a first step to bank nationalization?

On the presidential campaign trail, it’s almost as if the 1960s never happened.Barack Obama’s much-discussed speech in Philadelphia earlier this week was not only about race. It was also about economics and, specifically, about poverty. Measures of group wealth, or the lack of it, are often used to support claims that our society is racist. Obama’s speech revealed that though he may be, to many people, a refreshingly new kind of post-racial politician and a healer, when it comes to notions of poverty and economic advancement, his ideas are right out of the 1960s and 1970s. At one point in...

It's a generational thing. That was the theme of Barack Obama's speech last Tuesday, in which he both failed to renounce and at the same time separated himself from the man he has described as his spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama said that Wright's bellowing, "God damn America," was just a response to the evil treatment of America's blacks all those years ago by an old man (66) who does not realize, as Obama does and as the success of Obama's candidacy shows, that America is not static but has been perfecting itself. Obama's even tone and his...

Barack Obama's speech on racial issues showed him at his best. Serious and inspiring, it was the finest speech on this crucial issue in many years. It was effective politically, too, since it staunched the bleeding. Unfortunately for Obama's candidacy, he has already suffered deep political wounds from his close association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and the damage cannot be undone. As effective as Obama's speech was, it still evaded the hardest questions, which will linger and rise again in the general election. It soared above the most divisive issue affecting racial politics today, affirmative action. Obama has spoken about...

OK, so race is an issue in the current presidential campaign. It was, from the beginning, along with gender. When both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton proclaimed that neither should be considerations, I scoffed in a recent column. Continues...================================================================ Obama: I didn't inhale the 'Hate Whitey' sermons By "JohnHuang2" Monday, March 17, 2008 There isn't a smidgen of evidence that he had denounced the nut preacher's words before the firestorm broke out last week. And it is a fact that the pastor's unpastoral bent for spewing madrassa-like hateful inventive and his penchant for toxic racist rants from the pulpit were...

"I'm sure," said Barack Obama in that sonorous baritone that makes his drive-thru order for a Big Mac, fries and strawberry shake sound profound, "many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed." Well, yes. But not many of us have heard remarks from our pastors, priests or rabbis that are stark, staring, out-of-his-tree, flown-the-coop nuts. ...snip... It is Barack Obama's choice to entrust his daughters to the spiritual care of such a man for their entire lives, but in Philadelphia the senator attempted to universalize his peculiar judgment – to claim...

Watching the “Reverend” Jeremiah Wright gesticulate like a horny peacock and spew out ignorance, hatred, and bitterness towards America truly inspired my religious faith. Once Wright pointed out that he was “still in Bible country,” I began to “love the hell out of” rich, white people just as much as Wright does. How could so many people not understand that white people have caused all the world’s problems? As Wright pointed out to his congregation, the Bible says it’s so. I’m not sure what verse actually says that, but I’m now betting that rich, white people are responsible for my...

In his hour of political need, Barack Obama went to his base -- the media. He delivered a speech about the nation's racial divisions that couldn't possibly get anything but lavish praise from the press, burying for now the controversy over his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama made two arguments for why he couldn't reject the Rev. Wright. One was that the Rev. Wright lived through the era of segregation. So did many others. Surely, there are plenty of black pastors in the country who have suffered more than Wright without letting a left-wing racialist ideology taint their...

Sometimes, like a Cinderella team marching through March, Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign seems nothing short of charmed. It helps that while Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has 10 weeks to make Obama totally and entirely unelectable, Obama just has to wait out the clock. But the outside help Obama is getting (some that he asked for, some that he didn't) is the X-factor -- and it means that, even as Obama grapples with perhaps the biggest challenge to his candidacy, he will be the nominee short of something else dramatic happening in the race that's already seen everything. To survey...

Obama's Speech Applauded -- By Republican FoesGOPers and Conservatives Say Candidate's Speech Didn't End Wright Controversy By JAKE TAPPER March 19, 2008 Campaigning in North Carolina today, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., enjoyed overwhelmingly warm reviews from the media and the crowd in Charlotte for his speech about race and his controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But for far different reasons, Republican political consultants were delighted with the speech, as well. Looking ahead to November, GOP strategists say Obama did not remove Wright as a campaign issue. "He didn't explain why he continued to attend a church whose minister...

Some 50 delegates were reportedly poised to unite behind Barack Obama if he had won by even 1 point in Texas. He lost the popular vote by 100,000 ballots, and now we learn that 100,000 Republicans voted for Hillary Clinton, probably not because of some change in party allegiance but because they thought she would be the easier candidate to beat. This kind of strategic voting often backfires (think Ralph Nader). The Texas crossovers are winners. By helping to prolong the Democratic race, they can claim credit for weakening the eventual nominee, whoever it turns out to be. Obama has...

What a difference a day makes. Twenty-four hours after Barack Obama's teaching moment on race, the landscape was littered with eminent pundits, lying agog in the weeds, overcome by euphoria and flummoxed by failing eupepsia. Their squeals of praise were universally breathtaking: "It was an extraordinary moment of truth-telling." "A masterpiece!" "A profile in courage!" "Brilliant, inspiring, intellectually supple!" "Searing, nuanced, gut-wrenching and loyal." "A speech we have all been waiting for for a generation." The punditocracy, having overdosed on nuance, seared by supple and sore from all those wrenched guts, is fresh out of exclamation points, now on back...

Barack Obama’s attempt to defuse the crisis in his presidential campaign caused by videos of his “spiritual mentor’s” bigoted sermons has been spun as “the most significant public discussion of race in decades,” as The New York Times gushed. In fact, Obama merely recycled the tired received wisdom about race in America, the same clichés and nostrums peddled by television, government programs, movies, and just about every classroom in America. That this old racial script is being touted as some sort of fresh and “honest” discussion of race in America proves just the opposite. Liberal Americans, both black and white,...

WASHINGTON -- The beauty of a speech is that you don't just give the answers, you provide your own questions. "Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes." So said Barack Obama, in his Philadelphia speech about his pastor, friend, mentor and spiritual adviser of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright. An interesting, if belated, admission. But the more important question is: which "controversial" remarks? Wright's assertion from the pulpit that the U.S. government invented the HIV virus "as a means of genocide against people of color"? Wright's claim that America was...

Even those who are ardent opponents of Barack Obama's candidacy must admit his March 18 speech on race in America was, at least in parts, exceptional. You can agree or disagree with aspects of the speech, even dismiss segments of it as his standard stump speech, but it is hard to deny the speech as a whole was well thought out and well executed. The most inspiring part of his speech for me came when he discussed his background. "I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas," Obama told the assembled crowd...

But that is not the question. The question is why didn't he leave that church? Why didn't he leave...Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction. His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence and (b) white guilt. (a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there's Wright, but at the other "end of the spectrum" there's Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother... "I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was...

Barack Obama recently issued another of his linguistic masterpieces in addressing the issues of racism, hate-speech and his spiritual mentor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. His speech was pretty. It was eloquent. It was impassioned. It attempted to approach the true issue in danger of being overshadowed by a sensationalistic mainstream news media; racism in the total of American society, including the Black community. It even included a condemnation of specific statements by Wright, a man Obama says, “...has been like family to me.” But Obama’s speech fell short in answering some important ideological questions about his belief system and in...

Mr. Obama’s Philadelphia speech, in spite of its eloquent passages expressing his hope for better racial relations in America, is a mastery example of literary subterfuge, the broadening of the scenery whereby an object of inquiry becomes blurred and lost in the background, or more bluntly, the escaping of a slippery fish from a pond into a lake to hide in a wider expanse of water. His speech is essentially a sophisticated lawyerly defense of Rev Wright’s sin on the basis of self-defense. While Mr. Obama’s understanding on the root causes of America’s racial problems is quite apt, he attempts...

<p>That’s according to a new poll by InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion.</p> <p>First, we screened poll respondents to find those who were aware that Obama’s pastor was in the news. A startling 82% knew about Obama’s speech, and about the controversy surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.</p>

The beauty of a speech is that you don't just give the answers, you provide your own questions. "Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes." So said Barack Obama, in his Philadelphia speech about his pastor, friend, mentor and spiritual adviser of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright. An interesting, if belated, admission. But the more important question is: which "controversial" remarks? Wright's assertion from the pulpit that the U.S. government invented the HIV virus "as a means of genocide against people of color"? Wright's claim that America was morally responsible...

Barack Obama is nothing if not smooth. He seamlessly turned a would-be apology over his pastor's racism into an indictment against society's racism. It wasn't, "Jeremiah Wright was wrong, and I was wrong for going to his church for 20 years despite his apparently unforgiving spirit, his racist and anti-American utterances, and his vulgarity, including taking the Lord's name in vain from his very pulpit -- the one venue above all on God's sacred planet that such irreverence is inalterably forbidden. No matter what racial injustices have been perpetrated over the years by mankind toward mankind, they are never an...

Last October the Associated Press reported that Barack Obama had made a decision not to sport an American flag pin on his lapel:Asked about it Wednesday in an interview with KCRG-TV in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Illinois senator said he stopped wearing the pin shortly after the attacks and instead hoped to show his patriotism by explaining his ideas to citizens. "The truth is that right after 9/11 I had a pin," Obama said. "Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we're talking about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on...

As has been noted by NewsBusters correspondents Brent Baker, Kyle Drennen, and Clay Waters, the Mainstream Media has mostly assumed an attitude of respectful awe towards Barack Obama's March 18 speech on race. That emotional awe towards Obama's speech has reached the level of mass weeping in the Leftwing blogosphere. The leftists profess to be so awestruck by that speech that it seems mass crying will soon replace the fainting attacks at future Obama appearances. Confessions of drama queen tearful reactions to Obama's speech has reached comedic proportions on both the Democratic Underground and the Daily Kos. Although one suspects...

ONCE AGAIN, R-A-C-E has emerged as the thorniest rose in American life and politics. Barack Obama's powerful speech on Tuesday may have laid it to rest (for now). Before we wave bye-bye to the trapped-in-the-'50s (1950s? 1850s? 1750s?), attic-crazy Rev. Jeremiah Wright, let's salute him with a multiple-choice quiz:

Tim Rutten's column, "Obama's Lincoln moment" and The Times editorial, "Obama on race" both miss the mark. In my considered judgment as a race and civil rights specialist, I would say that Barack Obama's "momentous" speech on race settled on merely "explaining" so-called racial differences between blacks and whites -- and in so doing amplified deep-seated racial tensions and divisions. Instead of giving us a polarizing treatise on the "black experience," Obama should have reiterated the theme that has brought so many to his campaign: That race ain't what it used to be in America. I waited in vain for...

From Obama's Wright speech: I can no more disown [Rev. Dr. Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. Obama described the incident...

What the candidate should have said about race. By Michael Meyers March 20, 2008 Tim Rutten's column, "Obama's Lincoln moment" and The Times editorial, "Obama on race" both miss the mark. In my considered judgment as a race and civil rights specialist, I would say that Barack Obama's "momentous" speech on race settled on merely "explaining" so-called racial differences between blacks and whites -- and in so doing amplified deep-seated racial tensions and divisions. Instead of giving us a polarizing treatise on the "black experience," Obama should have reiterated the theme that has brought so many to his campaign:...

I am struck, though not entirely surprised, by the widening gulf between some Cable TV commentators and pundits reaction to Obama's speech and that of most of middle america. So disparate is the treatment, that It leads me to ask: did we watch the same speech? By and large, the acclamation given his speech by most liberal pundits has been unrestrained and effusive: On MSNBC, Sally Quinn gushed that it was the greatest in all of human history; tune in to any cable news channel and you will hear similar accolades. We have seen this all before, most notably in...

Barack Obama gave a speech about Jeremiah Wright Jr. on Tuesday. Of course, the Illinois senator couldn't say the speech was about his pastor's nutty and hate-filled rants. He had to pretend it was about more than controlling the damage from ties to his fire-breathing Chicago friend. So he gave an address about "race in America." It was, as such, a high-sounding affair with some noble phrases ("I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together") that were orated in signature Obama style. But his bid to give a major speech and...