The Dish

Finally. Now how about those tax returns?
 

Josh Green wants the superdelegates to decide already:

…by declaring now, rather than in late August, the superdelegates can arrive much sooner at the point where the winner is clear — the only means of halting the damage to their party. In Washington, there’s no happier situation for a politician than to be doing absolutely nothing and getting great press for it. But let’s be clear about one thing: keeping their powder dry profits the superdelegates, but comes at the expense of their party

Ross on the speech:

John Derbyshire is right that Obama’s vision of how America ought to transcend our racial divisions is essentially left-wing, with whites and blacks joining hands against to raise taxes and government spending, while uniting against their common enemy, the wicked axis of corporations, lobbyists and special interests. But Obama’s candidacy is essentially left-wing; he’s attempting to be a liberal Reagan, not a difference-splitter like Bill Clinton, and I think our political moment is tilting sufficiently leftward that he might just succeed… But this is a conservative’s quibble about a liberal politician’s address; it’s my way of saying "I wish Barack Obama were a little less left-wing," and it doesn’t detract from the speech’s overall impressiveness.

I do think the problem Jeremiah Wright creates for Obama’s campaign remains unresolved, to some extent, since there was nothing Obama could say in a single speech that would undo the perception created by his long affiliation with Wright and his church … But by using the Wright controversy as an opportunity to play up their candidate’s strengths – as an orator, but more importantly as the rare politician who can deliver a thoughtful, nuanced speech and make you feel like he means it – the Obama campaign made some sweet-tasting lemonade out of some bitter-tasting lemons.

A reader writes:

I thought I’d email you the exchange  between myself and my mother, a one-time strong Hillary supporter that crossed over after hearing Obama speak in our hometown of New Orleans, reacting to the Obama speech today:

Mom: I heard the Obama speech today. It was brave.

Me: With each crisis/charade or what have you, even when I find myself surprised that I would stop to question my support for him, he soars and ends up strengthening my reasons for supporting him in the first place. Yes, he is brave, he is real, and he has principles that have remained intact despite it all. The simple fact is that the entire campaign is now if Obama can survive the gauntlet and nothing else. He seems to be doing just that.

As this campaign progresses, this man grows and grows. The same cannot be said for his two remaining opponents.

Alan Wolfe:

I cannot recall any leader or potential leader in the last two or three decades asking us to do that. I hope we are up to the challenge. I do not believe–nor, from his speech, do I think that Obama believes–that to think seriously about race we have to vote for him.  But I do think that when we address race, we ought to do it, not by running endless videos of people, black or white, who have said outrageous things but by finally having the honest conversation about race we keep promising ourselves–and keep postponing. Agree or disagree with Obama, I ask people who are less inspired by him that I am, but at least acknowledge that in this presidential candidate, we have a man of honor–and an honest man.

Good for him. I’ve always loved the guy. But is anyone still questioning whether a protracted campaign hurts the Democrats?

Lyle Denniston gives an analysis:

The Supreme Court’s historic argument Tuesday on the meaning of the Constitution’s Second Amendment sent out one quite clear signal: individuals may well wind up with a genuine right to have a gun for self-defense in their home. But what was not similarly clear was what kind of gun that would entail, and thus what kind of limitations government cut put on access or use of a weapon.

A fascinating take.

A reader writes about Obama’s invocation of Faulkner:

That Obama was signalling – "The past isn’t dead.  It isn’t even past" – that his speech – and his candidacy – are about confronting history from a Faulknerian standpoint was, to me, the bravest thing he did. It signalled to me that he feels this discussion is more important than electoral success, and I can’t help but admire that. Although I didn’t know which words he was going to use in the second half of the speech, from that point, I knew the sense of most everything he was going to say.

Faulkner is too easily pigeonholed as being about race. Or about "The Fall of the Old South."  (You have never truly felt the urge to stab someone with a pen until you’re the only southerner in a room full of upper-midwestern accents insisting upon fitting everything in Faulkner neatly into the latter.)  But both of those miss the point — Faulkner is about the past, and the struggle to both accept it as a part of oneself and continue into the future.

Gavin Stevens, who said the line Obama quoted, got that; he was simply too afraid, in my opinion, to do much about it, especially after he tries and fails once.  But the relevant passage to Faulkner, and to Obama, is from "Delta Autumn" (from Go Down, Moses).  Ike McCaslin (in his 80s now) is in bed on a hunting trip, and the lover of his nephew comes in with their child, revealing herself.  She’s also a cousin of the McCaslins, from the illegitimate line caused by an affair with a slave.  So it’s inter-racial and incestuous.  It goes (Ike speaking, emphasis mine):

"That’s right.  Go back North.  Marry: a man in your own race.  That’s the only salvation for you–for a while yet, maybe a long while yet.  We will have to wait.  Marry a black man.  You are young, handsome, almost white; you could find a black man who would see in you what it was you saw in him, who would ask nothing of you and expect less and get even still less than that, if it’s revenge you want.  Then you will forget all this, forget it ever happened, that he ever existed–" until he could stop it at last and did, sitting there in his huddle of blankets during the instant  when, without moving at all, she blazed silently  down at him.  Then that was gone too.  She stood in the gleaming and still dripping slicker, looking quietly down at him from under the sodden hat.

"Old man," she said, "have you lived so long and forgotten so much that you dont remember anything you ever knew or felt or even heard about love?"

So they’re talking about love, yes (as Faulkner wrote elsewhere they "had to talk about something"), but it’s her rebuttal to "We will have to wait" that’s important.  Ike is a good person, less racist than almost anyone else of his generation, but the struggle with the past is too much for him.  He says wait.  The younger woman tells him unequivocally that he is wrong.

That’s what Obama was doing.  His speech was accepts Faulkner’s opinion of the past — that it is a part of us, and we must live with it — but rejects the fear most of his characters have of confronting it.  Our national heritage contains some of the brightest moments in human history, but also a number of moral failures.  I’m not proud of the latter, but as an American, they are a part of me, and if we are to become a stronger nation, we must learn to understand them, accept them as our past, and move beyond them.  What Obama said this morning is that we no longer have to wait for a while yet, maybe a long while yet.  The time is now, the place here, the people us.

Two posts if you missed them – on what he had to do and what he achieved.