The short answer is no
By Susan Estrich
Did he do it?
That was the question my friend, herself an old friend of Barack and Michelle Obama, asked me in the wake of the Illinois Senator’s powerful and eloquent speech on race this week.
Did he put the issue of race to http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3857?
The short answer is no.
The long version is more complicated, like the race question itself, like Barack Obama the candidate. Complicated and sometimes contradictory.
It’s clear, reading the coverage of the speech, that if you were an Obama http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3838 going in, you were even more convinced coming out.I know many Obama supporters who were deeply troubled by what they’ve been reading and seeing of the rants of his former pastor. It’s ugly stuff.
The pictures of the pastor and Minister Farrakhan, making nice with people who aren’t, are already showing up, and there will be more. It’s the kind of stuff that you know is out there, but you’d like to think of as being at the fringe, outside the realm of where decent people travel, confined to the margins of the blogosphere instead of the pulpit of a large and powerful Chicago church.
Obama did what he had to do to reassure those folks, the people who started as his supporters and wanted to be reassured that supporting Obama didn’t mean supporting the divisive message of his former pastor.
Don’t ask them if they’d feel the same way about a white candidate who compared his grandmother to a member of the Klu Klux Klan. That’s not how they see it.
What they heard Obama say is that he doesn’t buy the divisive message, that his campaign is not about mining the racial divide but about transcending it, that he isn’t choosing black against white in a zero sum fight for the crumbs of a shrinking pie.
Obama supporters describe themselves as being moved and touched, and their candidate as being brave and nuanced and forthright. They breathed a sigh of relief this week, convinced, more than ever, that America needs Barack Obama to be President.
Talk to Obama critics and you wonder, for a minute, if they heard the same speech.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/03/is_the_race_discussion_over.html