I found Obama’s speech profoundly depressing. It was cold, precisely calculated, and, on the Chris Matthews Legometer, stunningly effective, and (as Victor says below) likely to have very wide influence. A reader makes the following point:
How can we call on the “good Muslims” to bravely denounce and actively counter the jihadi terror-endorsing clerics who give their children permission to kill and to hate on behalf of Allah when we seem to be afraid to ask the good African-American Christians to stand up against those, like Wright, who call for the “damn”-ing of America, blame everything on “rich white” people, blame Israel and Jews for a host of imagined sins, and tell their children it is their duty to Jesus to “destroy” people because their skins are white?
Pre-speech, Mickey Kaus offered the following advice, untaken by the Senator:
There are plenty of potential Souljahs still around: Race preferences. Out-of-wedlock births. Three strike laws! But most of all the victim mentality that tells African Americans (in the fashion of Rev. Wright’s most infamous sermons) that the important forces shaping their lives are the evil actions of others, of other races. …
That is the psychosis that has left so much of the Muslim world mired in backwardness -political, social and economic. It’s sad that the first viable black candidate for the US presidency has chosen to endorse it domestically.