Berkley Center

I want to preface these rather critical observations about Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" address with non-faint praise. As far as I am concerned the good Senator is unequivocally the most intelligent and intellectually sophisticated politician in America today.

Why am I, as with many other members of the professorate, so enthralled by him? Well, for one he doesn't merely wish to solicit our votes, he wants to edify us as well. Yet in many ways this relentless quest to enlighten the electorate was one of the major problems with Tuesday's oration.

Listening to those thoughtful remarks one felt compelled to shake the cerebral Obama with the crabby fists of Realpolitik and cry: "Just win this damn nomination by any means necessary! Heed your hypothetical suggestion and "do the politically safe thing." Take your own advice and "join another Church. Put Rev. Wright far behind you and leave the edification to the professors of African-American studies!"

Of course he didn't do any of that in his speech. Oh, but what a speech it was! On a scale of 10 the degree of rhetorical difficulty was somewhere around infinity. For can Jesus disown John the Baptist?

Obama's debt to his pastor is immense. It may very well be the case that he is a Christian because of Rev. Wright. The latter may have declaimed "God damn America," but he officiated at the Senator's wedding. He may have invoked the absurd phrase, "state terrorism against the Palestinians" but he baptized the Senator's children.

So Obama's mission on Tuesday was an exceedingly difficult one. He had to strenuously disassociate himself from comments that must strike the Opposition Research teams of Clinton and especially McCain as manna from heaven. He had to reassure undecided White voters that he had no truck with a person who believed that the AIDS virus was a government plot. And in so doing, he had to avoid looking like a complete sell-out by throwing the Reverend under the bus with his little Kente cloth vest and all.

So much has been written about this speech that I want to restrict myself to three hopefully less obvious comments. My first observation, I think, points to issues of Obama's (laudable) character. For with his campaign on the verge of imploding, with the ashes of Rezko and NAFTA and Samantha Power smoldering around him, Obama responded not by lashing out against his opponents and cracking heads, but by being as intelligent as he possibly could. Which is saying much.

Read the following quote carefully and ask yourself: Do these sound like the words of a politician running for president or those of the great novelist Ralph Ellison (or maybe his colleague Albert Murray)?

"The church 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." My second point is that Obama engaged in a complex and ultimately hazardous act of turning Rev. Wright into a symbol. He drew a distinction between the man (whom he loves) and his incendiary remarks (which he deplores).

Yet when discussing his pastor the Senator posited an odd equation: "I can no more disown him than I can the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother." Whether intentionally or not, Obama has drawn a correlation between the troubled Wright and the entire African-American community (and his racist grandma to boot).

The association is as peculiar as it is fascinating. Does the senator wish to say that the over-the-top Wright is somehow representative of blacks in general? (That would be news to me and many others). And if that's the case, is Obama--who is not over-the-top--inadvertently suggesting that he has transcended the cruelty, ignorance, bitterness and bias of the rest of the community?

Finally, there was Obama's flawed but daring appeal to ethnic and blue-collar whites. In a bold passage he remarks "most working- and middle-class Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race." The Senator wanted to assure them that he understood their pain (getting whites to understand the pain of blacks constituted the first part of the speech so now it was time for some balance). He even--I think this is remarkable--referred to their fears about affirmative action and African-American street crime--as "grounded in legitimate concerns."

To demonstrate his empathy Obama rehearsed a litany of complaints about reverse discrimination and, astonishingly, didn't seem at all eager to deny their validity. His eye on the polls, he closes by asserting that the real enemy of whites (and blacks and all America) was "a corporate culture" and a corrupt Washington.

But it was precisely here where Obama's eloquence undermined him and where his penchant for complexifying issues threw him off message. For undecided white voters, whether they were leaning towards Clinton or McCain, did not want to hear a disquisition on the historical and sociological antecedents of Rev. Wright's indiscretions. Nor did they want to hear a homily about the treachery of the corporations and the lobbyists. (Those who think about such things are already firmly in the Obama and McCain camps anyhow).

What they wanted to know was that Senator Obama had absolutely nothing to do with the radical Left opinions of his spiritual mentor. They wanted to know how he could have been exposed to such opinions for two decades without having found "another Church." They wanted to know, yes, that he would disown him, because Rev. Wright harbored views about America whose legitimacy only certain radical professors, but not presidents of the United States, are willing to acknowledge as plausible.