Senator Barack Obama, under intense pressure to do something about Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the surrounding controversy, delivered another outstanding speech rich in its prose and conciliatory in its tone. In baseball parlance, he hit it out of the park to deep center field. In basketball parlance, he hit nothing but net behind the paint. And in football, ah, never mind.
He done good.
I have never been prouder of this outstanding young man. Every time during this presidential campaign that his back was up against the wall, he fought his way out and delivered a knockout blow (in boxing parlance). I have watched him time and again, first in 2000 when he suffered a crushing defeat in a local race for Congress. And then he proceeded to pick himself back up, dusted himself off and four years later won the 2004 Democratic primary for the United States Senate from Illinois, which in Illinois is equivalent to winning the general election.
And then on Tuesday, after being knocked back once again, he picked himself up, dusted himself off and he delivered another "great speech," again.
In a speech whose frankness about race many historians said could be likened only to speeches by Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, Senator Barack Obama, speaking across the street from where the Constitution was written, traced the country’s race problem back to not simply the country’s "original sin of slavery" but the protections for it embedded in the Constitution.
Yet the speech was also hopeful, patriotic, quintessentially American — delivered against a blue backdrop and a phalanx of stars and stripes. Mr. Obama invoked the fundamental values of equality of opportunity, fairness, social justice. He confronted race head-on, then reached beyond it to talk sympathetically about the experiences of the white working class and the plight of workers stripped of jobs and pensions.
"As far as I know, he’s the first politician since the Civil War to recognize how deeply embedded slavery and race have been in our Constitution," said Paul Finkelman, a professor at Albany Law School who has written extensively about slavery, race and the Constitution. "That’s a profoundly important thing to say. But what’s important about the way he said it is he doesn’t use this as a springboard for anger or for frustration. He doesn’t say, ‘O.K., slavery was bad, therefore people are owed something.’ This is not a reparations speech. This is a speech about saying it’s time for the nation to do better, to form a more perfect union."
The fact that Obama has risen to every challenge presented to him in this campaign by hitting it out of the park, hitting "nothing but net" and delivering a knockout blow at the right time is more evidence that this man, at this time in American history, is destined to become our 44th President. Reading on Walden Bookstore.