What if, in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky affair, Bill Clinton had delivered an eloquent and thoughtful speech on the place of sexuality in American life? As a transparent device to deflect attention from the real issue, that speech would have been poorly received. Yet something like this has just happened with Obama.

Just about every political observer analyzes Obama’s speech as a two-part affair. First, it was a speech about race in America. Second, it was a speech about Obama’s Wright problem. The consensus is that it was eloquent and powerful speech on race, but far less successful in dealing with Wright. Yet the deeper problem with Obama’s speech may be the decision to link the two issues at all.

Apparently, Obama had been thinking about delivering a general speech on race at some point in the campaign. Although he hadn’t planned on giving it any time soon, Obama decided that the best way to deflect attention from the Wright affair was to wrap it up in his long-planned discussion of race. So the big speech-in-process was taken off the shelf and deployed to save the campaign at its moment of crisis.

Obama supporters will see this as a perfectly legitimate use of the Wright controversy as a teachable moment on the issue of race. I suspect the conjunction of the Wright scandal and Obama’s larger lecture will have exactly the opposite effect. Rather than opening the public up to Obama’s broader views on the race issue, this affair is going to exacerbate suspicions that grand lectures on race are political devices designed to achieve far narrower and more self-interested goals.

The problem isn’t new. Liberals frequently lever the legitimate moral capital of the early civil rights struggle on behalf of enterprises that by no means necessarily follow from the principles of the original movement. The shift from integration to racial preferences was only the first such move. Nowadays, the left adopts “rights talk” even to cover its economic plans. And now we’ve seen the lofty moral capital of the original civil rights quest used to extract a politician from a scandal that ought to have been addressed on its own terms (which in fact had as much to do with leftist anti-Americanism as with race).

The long-term effect is likely to be corrosive. VDH has noted that by giving Wright at least half of a pass, Obama has made it tougher to deal with future cases of racism and hatred. The bar has now been set at just about floor level. But there’s another side to that coin. Not only has extremism on the scale of Wright been semi-excused, and softened with false equivalence, but the moral authority of civil rights talk itself has been devalued and rendered suspect. This is one more case — but a very important one — in which the moral capital of the civil rights movement has been squandered by expanding it into an all-purpose justification of the progressive agenda. This time it’s been misspent to rescue a progressive candidate from a scandal he ought to have confronted more directly.

To Obama’s supporters, the speech was an historic breakthrough. I suspect that instead it was an historic mistake. If, as he had originally intended, Obama had given the speech at a scandal-free moment, an actual national conversation on race might have ensured. But misusing the moral capital of the civil rights issue to disguise and diffuse a specific (and by no means entirely racial) problem cheapens dialogue and breeds cynicism.