The late Michael Kelly, “The Midlife Crisis of Jesse Jackson,” GQ, December 1990:

In the end, Jackson will fail to become a true national leader not because he is black (in fact, his legacy may be that he has single-handedly made the notion of a black president plausible) but because he is partially blind. You can’t lead a country you can’t see, and Jackson cannot really see the America that has much good in it. It is not that Jesse’s America doesn’t exist. It does. The American Revolution was, at first, a victory only for landed white guys. Our industrial growth and foreign expansion did depend greatly on race and class exploitation. But that is less than half the story of the nation. As much as the history of America is about subjugation, it is even more about liberation. Our history has been consumed in sometimes messy, sometimes ugly, but mostly successful fights to make true the promises of equality and justice that were given 214 years ago.

Barack Obama in an interview with Newsweek June 27, published today:

What I’m constantly striving to do—whether it was on the racial profiling legislation, whether it was on the death penalty issues that I worked on in the state legislature, whether it was on some of the criminal justice bills that came up—was to see how could I be true to the core values of fairness and equality and move the ball forward. My experience tells me that we have a better chance of making progress on these issues when we can ground them in a broader appeal to America’s aspirations and values than when we simply are shouting racism and trying to guilt people into acting.
Now that doesn’t mean there aren’t times for some righteous anger. But I strongly believe that Americans want to do the right thing. And if you can show them that racial profiling is neither a smart way to fight crime, nor is it consistent with our values as Americans, then we can get a bill passed. If you can argue to defenders of the death penalty that at minimum we should be able to agree that nobody innocent should be on death row, and by videotaping interrogations and confessions you are not only protecting the innocent person in custody but you are also protecting the police, then you have got a better chance of passing legislation.

If you want to be elected by a majority of Americans, it probably helps to think well of them.

UPDATE: Of course, later in that interview, Obama says:

I think there’s a temptation to posit me in contrast to Jesse [Jackson] or [Al] Sharpton, and the thing I am constantly trying to explain is that I’m a direct outgrowth of the civil rights movement, that the values of the civil rights movement remain near and dear to my heart. To the extent that I speak a different language or take a different tone in addressing these issues is a consequence of me having benefited from those bloody struggles that folks previously had to go through. And so to suggest somehow that I’m pushing aside the past in favor of this Benetton future is wrong.