Speech Reactions:
http://time-blog.com/real_clear_politics/2008/03/speech_reax.html Marc Ambinder:
I do think that Obama's speech was a marvel of contemporary political rhetoric. Politically, analytically and emotively, it hit many high notes. His acknowledgment of white working class resentments (busing) and about the perception that there's been no racial progress, his willingness to stick by his friends, his grasp of history, his sense that our views of race are cramped and caricatured... all of that is something that even those who disagree with the substance of his speech, can, I think, appreciate.
Ben Smith:
A smart colleague notes that this speech is the polar opposite of this year's other big speech on faith, in which Mitt Romney went to Texas to talk about Mormonism, but made just one reference to his Mormon faith. Obama mentions Wright by name 14 times.
Paul Mirengoff, PowerLine:
Although Obama's speech is not without its evasions, I consider it a courageous one by usual political standards. He has refused to walk away from Wright's black liberation theology when it might well have been expedient to do so. The rest of us now should have the courage to take Obama at his word and decide whether it is acceptable to elect as president of the United States someone who carries Rev. Wright around as part of him, and who takes his ranting seriously.
Andrew Sullivan:
But I do want to say that this searing, nuanced, gut-wrenching, loyal, and deeply, deeply Christian speech is the most honest speech on race in America in my adult lifetime. It is a speech we have all been waiting for for a generation. Its ability to embrace both the legitimate fears and resentments of whites and the understandable anger and dashed hopes of many blacks was, in my view, unique in recent American history.
John Podhoretz, Contentions:
Barack Obama's unusual campaign has just led to one of the most unusual speeches in American political history. The purpose of the speech is to set his own political controversy into the largest possible context to zoom out, as it were, and make it appear as though the disgusting remarks of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, are the merest speck, a mere glancing moment in time in the centuries-long history of American race relations. He begins with the drafting of the Constitution, skips forward in time top Wright's remarks, moves back to the legacy of segregation, and onward into the horrific populist present, with black people and white people suffering horrors untold in what he says is a great country but what he intimates is a giant piece of wreckage.
Kevin Drum, Washington Monthly:
I thing we can safely assume that Barack Obama's supporters will all swoon over his speech today. And why not? It was, as usual for him, a helluva good address: intelligent, sane, sympathetic, and broadly appealing. He didn't, however, sound to me like he was really very eager to keep this conversation about race going, a feeling that's easy to understand if you take a look at what's burbling through the conservative id right about now.
Jim Geraghty, NRO:
I think the speech is wildly uneven; but I suspect that it will be praised far and wide in over-the-top terms. I think you'll be hard-pressed to find a commentator on the left who will criticize it. ... The real million-dollar question... will this speech be enough Obama get working-class whites to vote for him?
Ezra Klein, American Prospect:
But this speech was something I didn't expect: Honest. It was honest about Obama's affection for Wright, even as it repudiated Wright's comments. It was honest about the tragic history of race in America, even as it expressed faith in a redemptive future. It was honest about the resentment peddlers and racial charlatans who try and recast the increasing rarity of the American Dream as the consequence of ethnic competition rather than gross power imbalances. It was honest in its recognition that racial memory influences contemporary thought, honest in admitting that there's anger in this country, and it's justified, and that there's fear in this country, and it's real.
David Brody, CBN:
We won't know for awhile how voters view Barack Obama's speech today on race relations but The Brody File saw it as a HUGE positive for Obama and a successful turning point for the future of his campaign.
