Just watching Obama’s race-and-religion speech, and I think he’s blowing it. Here’s why:
1. The Rev. Wright, he says, is like family to him–and not like the crazy uncle. Family like his mother and grandmother, he says. The Rev. Wright is a conspiracy kook and a racist. You don’t get to choose your family, unless you adopt. And Obama has just adopted the Rev. Wright.
2. Obama just went on a riff about all the complexities of race in America “that we’ve never really worked through.” The upshot: Let’s pick every scab off of every racial grievance in the history of the United States and “work through” those “complexities.” Let’s don’t. It doesn’t sound like a good idea, especially for the guy who was supposed to be the post-racial candidate. “Working through complexities” sounds like a trip to the marriage counselor to me. Obama is running for president of the government, not Redeemer-in-Chief.
3. Blaming black America’s problems on the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow isn’t going to cut it, especially if you don’t have some interesting, radical proposal to address those problems. But Obama has proven himself to be a more-of-the-same politician with a gift for oratory. He’s already backing away from his best proposal, i.e. letting poor families decide which schools will educate their children.