If you haven’t watched Obama’s race speech yet, please do so.

It’s noteworthy, I think, that this speech prompted Jon Stewart to a moment of seriousness reminiscent of his brilliant (I mean it) Crossfire diatribe. There was no joking in his eyes (though the serious irony was pointed) when he summed up the speech as “an American politician speaking to Americans about race as though they were adults.” In this speech Obama has done what Stewart pleaded with Crossfire to do: he moved beyond easy partisanship, told some uneasy truths, and has therefore gotten us somewhere* new. In Obama we’d have a president who not only understands and acknowledges the anger on both sides of a major issue, but makes bold to explain each side to the other, and proposes a solution.

But please, whoever your candidate of choice may be, just watch this–for its historical value, if for nothing else.

(It’s just under 40 minutes, in 10-minute segments here)

——
* Yes, I am aware that the term “somewhere” is vague. I am aware that in general Obama gives us hope and visions and inspiration…about something vague. But I think in this race he has to. First, because Hillary so clearly has him beat on being able to talk all wonky-like. He can’t hope to compete. Second, because when it comes down to specifics, their platforms are nearly identical. The value-added of Obama, the thing that makes him distinctive, is his ability to inspire and the way in which he does it–through truly thoughtful analysis and the courage to not just “tell truth to power” but to tell truth about power while in a powerful position himself.

When you’re a fan of something, you run the risk of people assuming you believe all the same things as every other fan out there. Fan stereotyping if you will.

To that point, as an Obama fan, I want to make clear that I do NOT believe, support, or even fathom this article in the Times. It argues, of all things, that Hillary’s ubiquitous red-phone ad is racist.

I just don’t get it at all. How do you get from “innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger” (which I grant you is super hypey but whatever) to “The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man”?

The only concrete piece of supporting evidence in the piece is that there are no black people in the ad and that the mother is a blonde. And then the author makes the leap that OBVIOUSLY the undefined terror outside the house is therefore BLACK PEOPLE = OBAMA.

It’s people like this that give the Obama campaign a bad name.

Barack Obama plans to challenge Hillary Rodham Clinton’s contention that she has been more thoroughly scrutinized.

– NYT, 3/5/08

The irony here is killing.

Killing my interest in and commitment to politics, that is.