Obama To Give Speech, Not Press Conference About Wright
03/18/2008
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Sen. Obama has scheduled a major address on race for Tuesday in Philadelphia:

”This is why I’m giving a speech about this tomorrow, that will be a lot more wholesome than a press conference. Does that make sense?” Obama asked.

Yeah, it makes sense — you don't want to have to answer tough questions.

It ought to be a good speech. Obama has had years to prepare for this moment that inevitably had to arrive.

It might even be a great speech, if Obama can summon up the courage to overcome his fear that he's not "black enough." If he explains to blacks that he used to subscribe to what Wright says, but he's learned over the years that blaming everything on the white man is just self-defeating for blacks, that it's been a generation-and-a-half since the Civil Rights years, that blacks have to grow up.

But, I expect it will instead just be more of the Will.i.am-quality soft soap he's been ladling out for years.

Keep in mind that the Wright-Obama connection has two interrelated but distinguishable aspects: the black racial angle and leftist ideological angle. My guess is that Obama will play up the black angle of his past (as being both more understandable — seeing as how Obama, kind of like Jesus, was a poor black child raised by a single mother in the ghetto of Honolulu — and more untouchable by the press) and totally ignore the leftist angle.

It would be more fun if Obama reversed the polarity and snarled, "Yeah, yeah, for the last 12 years, I forced myself to nod in seeming agreement when all those smug Friedmanite economists at my University of Chicago would ramble on about the magic of the market. But, in my heart, I knew this glorious day would come when the capitalist system crumbles in ruins! Nyah-hah-hah-hah!"

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