Everyone else has weighed in on Obama’s speech, so I doubt I’ll add anything to what’s already been said, but a few things struck me.  First, Yuval Levin is right that the speech reads much better than it sounds, which is the reverse of how Obama’s speeches usually work.  When Obama goes into explanatory, rather than hortatory, mode, his speaking style becomes unremarkable–not bad, but not memorable or moving, either.  As explanations go, the speech itself was rhetorically brilliant, at least at times, and made the best of a politically treacherous situation that it possibly could have.  Besides the frequent reaction that it went on too long, the speech received praise mostly from those who were willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt and received scorn from everyone who had already decided at the end of last week that Obama is now radioactive (though apparently it brought John Tabin to the verge of tears).  The length is a problem, because that will limit its circulation and its impact, and it will leave the distillation of the speech’s message to intermediaries, who will necessarily simplify what Obama clearly tried to make a very complicated speech.  The fact that Obama is even giving a speech like this, while politically necessary, is nonetheless politically damaging, insofar as his campaign has thrived because Obama has been talking about policies that do not polarise voters along racial lines, and he spent a good part of this speech on these very policies, education and affirmative action being the most contentious among them.  It is absolutely true, as John McWhorter says, that for Obama to give a speech like this as a black politician was bold and remarkable, but I think it will mostly reassure those who were very ready to be reassured and not many more.  

The general audience that will be hearing clips of the speech or reading unfavourably framed citations in various columns may or may not believe that Obama rejects Wright’s more extreme views, but many of them are positively going to dislike the explanation.  In our political discourse any attempt to explain something is taken as an attempt to defend and justify it, and it will always be portrayed that way by opponents.  That isn’t what Obama was doing, but it won’t matter.  A political culture that can build a mass movement around simple and utterly vacuous statements (“change we can believe in” springs to mind) is also one that does not reward candidates who can appreciate the “contradictions” within their controversial associates.  Of course, we remember that in the campaign against John Kerry the word “nuance” itself became an insult, as if subtlety and qualification were undesirable, but in a mass media age and in a mass democracy nuance usually creates one of two impressions: dishonesty or confusion.  This is one of those impossible situations in which Obama could only have navigated this speech by being highly cerebral, and yet politically it is exactly the wrong moment for him to engage in his “on this hand, on the other hand” reasoning.  As appalling as I find this reality, Obama needed to follow his wife’s debate advice (“don’t think, feel”) and instead made an attempt to think his way through a controversy that has stirred visceral reactions.    

Especially on second reading, the speech seems to me to engage in the usual Obama moves of acknowledging an opponent’s concerns right before piling on advocacy for his own preferred policies.  There’s nothing terribly remarkable about this sort of move, but it is not evidence of someone who can build coalitions across party and ideological lines.  Appealing to white working-class voters with something like a “fight the real enemy” appeal to class solidarity against the rich is the sort of thing that will unnerve more voters than it wins over, while the entire section in which he expresses understanding for white resentments against affirmative action, busing and the like will come across to its intended audience as condescension.  Whether or not Obama intends to be condescending, the combination of his professorial delivery and analytical style probably reminds working-class voters that he can’t really identify with them and makes it more difficult for them to identify with him.  He targets corporations as the villains of the piece, but is himself a half-hearted critic of NAFTA and the very policies that he, the progressive globalist, normally supports, which drives home the impression that he is no more on the side of working-class voters than any other national politician. 

Meanwhile, any explanation of the causes of anger, whether you find the description of the causes compelling or not, is likely to go over very badly, again because it will be perceived by many as a justification of anger and thus of extremism.  It was, of couse, the ultimate example of Obama’s own lack of awareness or a depressing instance of lame pandering and damage control that he could explain the causes of black and white resentments in America and then turn around and be so utterly party-line in his criticism of Wright’s views of Near East conflicts:

a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

Obviously, he is protecting himself against a larger backlash by taking an utterly conventional and simplistic position on this, in which Israeli policies evidently have nothing to do with Palestinian or Lebanese anger and frustration.  (Radical Islam does have a significant and powerful role in organising and directing the anger and frustration created by Israeli actions and policies, and then using those things to launch atrocious attacks on civilians, but its appeal doesn’t come out of nowhere.)  In other words, this kind of understanding is sufficient for his community, but it doesn’t apply to other peoples. 

I should add that the worst part of the speech was the pairing of his grandmother with Wright.  If Obama’s loyalty to Wright is admirable in light of the political risk involved, his use of his grandmother in the speech was just as awful and unnecessary.  Of course he isn’t going to disown his grandmother, and no one would have expected him to, and comparing the two was completely inappropriate.