Deal wrote:

Obama's speech is beautifully written, but it is essentially spin, an avoidance of the central issue as posed by black theology: Is the white race the oppressor, and should it be addressed as an oppressor and treated as one?

We'll have to disagree on this one: I thought Obama's speech was remarkable and I can't imagine anyone else on the America scene who could have delivered it. He addressed the legitimate grievances in the various communities while rejecting the notion that whites are oppressors:

Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Further, I think Obama effectively handled his relationship with his former pastor by explaining why he chose to attend Trinity, with all of its warts and imperfections:

Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

The Clintons will continue to work the Rev. Wright angle, and McCain's people will pick it up should they fail, but the issue is resolved for me. I have plenty of friends and family who hold views I don't particularly care for. So what? They remain my friends and family, despite the disagreements. If I don't live my own life following a Purity of Association standard, why should I demand it of a presidential candidate? Do I care if my automechanic's wife insists she was abducted by aliens? Does it matter if my physician's husband is an atheist? Will I switch banks if I learn that the president's father is a cranky old racist? Where does it end?

I dearly hope that with this speech, the media will be ready to abandon the distractions of Reverend Wright and John Hagee and move onto the issues that will affect the country the next 4 years. With a collapsing economy, a war in Iraq, a skyrocketing deficit, plummeting currency, and a sizable portion of the planet that neither trusts nor likes us, we've surely got more pressing matters.