Obama has given a beautiful speech on race and his affiliation with the Trinity Unity Church of Christ

– Barbara Ehrenreich, March 2008 (http://ehrenreich.blogs.com/barbaras_blog/2008/03/hillarys-nasty.html)

It’s hard sometimes for me to understand how Obama is able to milk so much reaction out of speeches that are not only pedestrian, but which contain truly startling statements.  The speech he made yesterday, for example:  how can he manage to dedicate a whole address to the importance of overcoming racism, and in the middle of that talk not only essentially smear his pastor with the "Angry Black" stereotype, but also endorse the ongoing US policy of racism and injustice towards the Palestinians, and then somehow come out of the whole thing smelling like roses, sending hyperventilating progressives all over the country to their smelling salts, believing that they’ve heard the "greatest speech’ of modern times!”

 – “epppie,” an e-mail correspondent, March 19, 2008

I just read Barack Obama’s Latest Greatest Speech – his celebrated address on race, titled “A More Perfect Union” [1], yesterday  (I am writing on the morning of March 19 2008), in Philadelphia.  Sparked by recent broadcasts of his longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright’s angry denunciations of U.S. imperialism and racism, the speech changes nothing for me.

Deluded Obamanists can stop sending me e-mails saying (to quote one this morning) “wow he really knocked them dead in Philly telling it like it is on Race. Now will you please finally get on board with the Great Barack?”

As his most recent Grand Oration shows, the Chosen One is not about to sacrifice political ambition for the sake of truth and justice. 

Yesterday’s address was all about Obama using his former pastor as a pretext for yet more triangulation [2]. Wright was employed as a foil for Obama to pose as reasonable on race and racism while he continued his project of deepening public confusion on racist and other United States oppression structures at the heart of American society.

Paul Street

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Paul Street is an independent radical-democratic policy researcher, journalist, historian, author and speaker based in Iowa City, Iowa, and Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of more than ten books and numerous essays. Street has taught U.S. history at numerous of Chicago-area colleges and universities. He was the Director of Research and Vice President for Research and Planning at the Chicago Urban League (from 2000 through 2005), where he published a highly influential grant-funded study: The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation (October 2002).