several times today.  With each reading I come away more impressed by what an adept politician he is.  He dealt with one of the overarching issues of our time with a facility that would make any old time politico proud and in so doing he avoided answering - what are for me - two key questions: 

During his twenty year friendship with Reverend Dr. Wright did he ever have in depth conversations with him about his views?

As President would he continue to passively attend services in a church which would seem to a great many of his constituents to be biased against them without addressing those issues?

For you see my concerns are not with the remarks Jeremiah Wright made but with Senator Obama's reaction to those remarks.  One is not responsible for the racist remarks of another person but if one fails to react to those racist remarks then he/she becomes complicit with the speaker.  Would we accept as our President a white southerner who sat in the pew and listened without remark while his minister made racist comments about the African American community?  God, I hope not.  

Reverend Joseph Lowery speaking on CNN said that a message in Senator Obama's speech that had been perhaps overlooked was that "he did not leave his church" because a person does not leave a relationship but instead "stays and see it through."  I could not agree more with this sentiment.  Many of the ills of our country are caused by supposed adults who desert their marriages, their children, their responsibilities rather than doing the hard work that is required to mend them.  It would not be proper to ask that Senator Obama leave his church home of more than two decades or repudiate his spiritual mentor and friend.  I do not think though that it is inappropriate to ask that a man who has an undeniable gift for both intelligent debate and rhetoric engage his church community in a dialogue about words he himself characterizes as "incendiary."  In Tuesday's speech - uplifting and seemingly unifying though it may have been - the Senator did not "stay and see it through", he
got up and moved his audience to a whole different neighborhood.

Senator Obama is correct: we must address racism, it exists.  It exists not just for those of African American heritage but for Jews and Muslims and Asian Americans, too.  To simply acknowledge racism, however, does not remove its plague.  Admittedly yesterday afternoon and this morning the discussion of race in this country probably exploded exponentially.  I'm not sure though - unless the conversation is going on in Starbucks - that today those discussions are much different than they were the day before Senator Obama made his speech.  Conversations about race - both reasoned and racist - were common in the south fifteen years ago when I was stopping by the water cooler and attending social and political gatherings and I read nothing in Senator Obama's speech that will somehow miraculously change the tenor of those exchanges.  

The African American who yesterday felt the burden of a country still in many ways mired in racism is not today somehow free of that yoke.  The caucasian blue collar worker who yesterday felt himself/herself the victim - however unintended - of affirmative action, didn't wake up today with a new appreciation of the need to redress past sins that were not of his/her making.  And I can assure you, dear reader, that no one who was a dyed in the wool racist yesterday had a come to Jesus meeting after hearing about the history of prophetic ministry, no matter how valid, historic and interesting.  Indeed, for many sitting on the racist fence, discovering that black churches often follow Reverend Dr. Wright's line of thought if not his words verbatim will be the push they need to join the dark side of the force.

There in lies the continuing problem I have with Senator Obama's words; it is not that they are "just words", I recognize that words are powerful, that words have meaning.  It is that the Senator's words are so "round" - they have no sharp edges.  Senator Obama's speech no doubt delighted his base - hell, on first listening, it delighted me.  Today though I am left feeling like I ate Lean Cuisine when what I wanted was a Hungry Man Dinner.

On Tuesday, March 18, 2008, Barack Obama delivered a skillful, well written address, an address he had to make in order to be seen as a viable candidate in the general election; in many ways it was a speech that only he could write, that only he could speak.  Whether it will stand as a watershed moment in the history of civil rights only the years will tell; without a doubt it will go down as one of the great political speeches ever written.