Ringing the Bell

Race, Thomas Jefferson said, is "a firebell in the night." You can't unring a bell, which is one of the reasons so many commentators thought Barack Obama was cooked in January when Hillary Clinton's surrogates introduced race into the campaign.

Those analysts were wrong; Obama didn't become the "black candidate" then. And I hope they're wrong again when they say that as long as Obama is talking about race instead of the economy and health care, he's losing.

For the bravest thing Obama did in his historic speech at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia was to ring the bell louder. He chose to focus on an uncomfortable topic that most Americans would rather leave unspoken. He offered an honest and gutsy tour of the complexities of our wounded national psyche, even explaining that his own beloved white grandmother engaged in racial stereotypes. And he articulated a big part of what his supporters liked about him in the first place: the chance to take us into a better racial future.

This speech, which he wrote himself over the last couple of days, was not necessarily the obvious path when confronted by the campaign crisis involving the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's inflammatory sermons. To understand the quality of it, consider some of the Obama campaign's other options.

If he were approaching the controversy conventionally, Obama would have simply expanded on his March 14 cable interviews and denounced Wright's comments (e.g., "God damn America!") more loudly, then waited, as he said, for the issue to "fade into the woodwork." Given the dire economic news and whatever else might end up in the headlines, this approach would have likely worked just fine. Even if he threw Wright under the bus, black voters would still turn out for him. And enough white voters would have been placated to pull him through the next few weeks without collapsing. After all, the primary calendar continues to make Obama the heavy favorite for the nomination.

Or Obama could have dealt briefly with the Wright problem, then pivoted to his stump speech about the challenges facing the country. This would have satisfied the conventional preference of consultants for the candidate to "stay on message." Discussing, as he did, such things as what was good about Wright, bad about school busing and complicated about racial feelings did not serve that traditional political objective.