The Speech Helped

There's little doubt that the Rev. Wright's words, with 30 years of sermons trimmed down to a few three word phrases, was enough to cause trouble for Senator Obama.  

On March 18 - the day of Obama's speech - after clips of Wright's sermons had permeated the media, Clinton held a seven-point lead over Obama.

But after the speech?

The first major national poll taken since Sen. Barack Obama's speech on race in America shows Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in a virtual tie, reversing Obama's slide in the polls after the wide airing of controversial remarks made by his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

"It's hard to disentangle the impact of (Obama's) speech," Gallup Poll Editor in Chief Frank Newport said Tuesday. The latest Gallup Poll, taken March 22, showed the Illinois senator with 47 percent of the national Democratic vote and Clinton with 46.

Despite desperate efforts by the pundits to slice and dice Obama's speech into loose phonemes and reconstruct them in some way they could ridicule, it seems that a good percentage of people actually listened to the speech.

Hopefully this is not just a good sign for Barack Obama, but a good sign that the country is ready to engage in honest dialog over divisive issues.  So all the naysayers -- from Juan Williams to Pity-Pat Buchanan -- who declared that Obama should have instead thrown away all connection to his church and groveled for forgiveness, can now move on to their analysis of how the American people just don't get it.