Obama’s speech exceeds politics

The striking thing about Barack Obama’s speech on race wasn’t that he rejected statements by his former pastor that were generally uncomplimentary toward the United States. That was the political reason driving Obama to make the speech.

It was, strategically and recognizably, the speech of a political candidate.

What was bold about the speech in Philadelphia was not that he rejected the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., but that Obama refused to renounce him. Or even apologize for him.

What the candidate did was something more daring. Rejecting Wright, Obama then insisted that America understand him.

The pressures were direct. As footage of a Wright sermon rejecting “God Bless America” in favor of “God Damn America” played on an endless cable news loop, Obama’s poll ratings were dropping, and the senator had to address the damage.

Obama said the things necessary to respond to his political problems. He rejected Wright’s comments as expressing “a profoundly distorted view of this country,” as “not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity.”

Then he insisted, “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.”

Obama went on to talk about Wright’s work in social programs in Chicago, about his efforts to connect personally with whites and other groups, in a world of conflict and clashing expectations. The black church, Obama declared, “contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and, yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.”

He firmly made the point that Wright’s comments were not only an event in the campaign of 2008, but a reflection of everything blacks have lived through in the last half-century and before.

“For the men and women of Rev. Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years,” said Obama. “That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table.”

And sometimes in church.

All presidential candidates, as part of the job description, warn against anger and bigotry. But it’s a bolder, more demanding move for a candidate, especially a black candidate, to insist that there is a context to black anger, that it didn’t just surface one Sunday morning in a sermon.

Considerable elements in the speech spoke to both political calculation and calculated piety. Obama can caution, with earnest sadness, that “We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card,” as if his campaign hasn’t been persistently pouncing. He can recall ruefully how “We say racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary,” without noting that his campaign was strenuously using Clinton comments to maximize his black support, which delivered his primary landslide.

In America, innocence is in short supply in both race and politics.

But Tuesday morning, Obama attempted to do something more complicated than his political problems required. Candidates always assure voters that they hear the voice of America; Obama recognized anger as a part of that voice, and while he refused to identify with it, he urged voters to hear it.

Whites listening to Wright, declared Obama, had to understand that “the anger is real. It is powerful, and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

Obama found himself in political danger because of a sermon. He tried to find his way out by delivering one of his own.