Obama's Speech, Sliced and Diced

Fox Chicago correspondent Jeff Goldblatt says he was looking into whether Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ deserved its tax-exempt status. In his report on Wednesday, March 12, he played a clip of Wright saying that the country is "controlled by rich white people" and that Hillary Clinton "ain't never been called a [N-word]."

"When it became palpable to the public is when there was a videotape," Goldblatt says.

On "Good Morning America" the next day, Brian Ross played video of Wright saying "God damn America," asserting that the government gives African Americans drugs and that the 9/11 attacks showed "America's chickens are coming home to roost."

Ross says the tapes he ordered came in early this month and he soon "realized they went beyond what had earlier been reported . . . The 'God damn America' and 'US of KKK A' and 9/11 took it to a level that surprised me." Ross dispatched a crew to the church and the story was supposed to run early last week, but got bumped by the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal.

But even as CNN and MSNBC began airing the Wright videos, the New York Times and "NBC Nightly News" ran only brief items Friday, and The Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, USA Today and the "CBS Evening News" carried nothing. It wasn't until Saturday that the controversy hit The Post's front page.

As I suggest above, the reaction on the left and right sometimes made me wonder whether these pundits were watching the same speech. The only point of agreement I found is skepticism that it will help Obama with white, working-class voters, sometimes short-handed as Reagan Democrats.

The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn: "While I have no idea how it will play out politically, I thought it made an elegant and, at times, brilliant argument--not just for the Obama candidacy but also for the modern liberal agenda."

Michelle Malkin: "Barack Obama -- the self-anointed soul-fixing, nation-healing political Messiah -- has lost his glow. That is the takeaway from the beleaguered Democratic presidential candidate's 'major' speech in Philadelphia. For all of his supposedly unique and transcendent understanding of race in America, Obama's talk amounted to the same old, same old.

"The Glowbama mystique has gone the way of the Emperor's new clothes. Instead of accountability, we got excuses. Instead of disavowal of demagoguery, we got whacked with moral equivalence. Instead of rejecting the Blame America mantra of left-wing black nationalism, we got more Blame Whitey. Same old, same old."

Jonah Goldberg: "There was wonderful stuff to be found in Obama's address. You can be sure the mainstream press and the Democratic faithful will leap at the opportunity to coronate Obama for his statesmanship and brilliance the way a man dying of thirst plunges into the cool water of an oasis. The Wright story is over for everybody but the so-called forces of divisiveness. But oases can reveal themselves to be mirages . . .

"The old baggage has been replaced with shinier suitcases, but the contents are the same as ever. Black America's problems can be solved by spending more money on the same old Great Society programs. Any talk about black America's problems that takes the eyes off that prize is a 'distraction.' And, yet again, white Americans can prove their commitment to racial justice by going along with more big government. My hope for something better proved too audacious in the end."

The aforementioned Jay Carney, in Time: