Much better, on LEVELS, than the journalistic hit-job he did on my hometown in 1986. 🙂

Once upon a time, one of the greatest writers America has ever produced, Amiri Baraka, covered the 1988 Democratic National Convention for Essence magazine. (Baraka later wrote a whole book-length essay on Jesse Jackson’s relationship with Black people from the assignment.) In the excerpt I read in Baraka’s reader, he quotes Jackson as the Reverend delivers his main address:

Conservatives and progressives, when you fight for what you believe, right wing, left wing, hawk, dove, you are right from your point of view, but your point of view is not enough.

To which Baraka responds in his essay: How can the slavemaster and the slave be right?

That line is key to understanding Baraka’s public sadness about how the Black Power political coalition of the late 1960s and early 1970s degenerated into Reagan-era compromise.

I never forgot that brilliant question. And I thought about it yesterday while I scanned the text of Obama’s speech.

Then I saw the speech this morning, reading along as he spoke.

I saw and read how Obama clearly threw Rev. Jeremiah Wright under the bus, but grabbed him before it decided to back up over Wright’s broken body. The senator will pay for this compassion for a looooong time, ’cause many will not remember that his white grandmother was with Wright under there.

Mixing metaphors, he knocked it out the park and made the best lemonade I’ve ever tasted. 🙂

Obama constructed a complex speech because he is trying to create a complex reality in which the (sons of) slaves and the (sons of) slavemasters are both right—that they both can agree and come to that “common ground” Jackson spoke about 20 years ago. Publicly, I can agree with that perspective while privately I can wonder about his racial socio-political equations.

If anybody can make American racial common ground a reality (and actually win the Presidency because of it), it’s Obama. The speech was, by any standard, a powerful moment in the history of 21st century American politics.

March 21st UPDATE: Ladies and gentlemen, Jon Stewart. 🙂