Charles Kaiser on Obama's MLK moment

He did it.

No other presidential candidate in the past 40 years has managed to speak so much truth so eloquently at such a crucial juncture in his campaign as Barack Obama did today. And he did it by speaking about race, the most persistent source of hatred among us since America began.

It turns out that a candidate for president with a white mother and a black father has a capacity that no one else has ever had before: He can articulate an equal understanding of black racism and white racism—and that makes it possible for him to condemn both of them with equal passion.

Ever since Rev. Jeremiah Wright's hateful sermons began to dominate the cable-news airwaves a few days ago, Washington reporters and the right-wing attack machine have been salivating at the chance to use those words to destroy another promising candidate. But today, Obama did what he does better than anyone else: He reminded America that we can be, and we must be, better than that.

The truth is, for 40 years, it has been the Republicans who have used prejudice of every kind against black people and gay people and immigrant people to divide and conquer in November. And Obama did not flinch from pointing that out. Instead, he looked the nation squarely in the eye and declared, "Not this time!"

"Like the anger within the black community," he said, white resentments "aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism."

And right there, on MSNBC, was Pat Buchanan, the most prominent example of this sorry class of citizen, who strained to put the worst face on Obama's transcendent speech even as he acknowledged its effectiveness. Only on cable television in America could a man who has written that Adolf Hitler was "an individual of great courage," and dismissed the idea that "white rule of a black majority is inherently wrong" in South Africa—only on a cable news network could such a person be allowed to attack someone else for failing to disassociate himself sufficiently from another man's racist remarks.

But Obama was too courageous to bow to the chattering classes by repudiating his former pastor altogether. Instead, he did something much more difficult, and much more important: He offered a nuanced view of his mentor's failings. "The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society," said Obama. "It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country—a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black, Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old—is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know—what we have seen—is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope—the audacity to hope—for what we can and must achieve tomorrow."

Sally Quinn was also on MSNBC today, and just as she was after Mitt Romney's pathetic speech about religion a few months back, she was the most intelligent commentator on TV. When Obama finished speaking, she declared, "This may be hyperbole, but this may be the most important speech about race since Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech." It was not hyperbole.

If Obama is elected president, it will be because he has been the first candidate in many years to try to appeal to what is best in America: "What is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world's great religions demand—that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother's keeper, scripture tells us. Let us be our sister's keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well." Unlike the approach of every Republican candidate for president, that is a perfect example of the way religion should be used in American politics.

In Obama's words today, you could hear the mystic chords of memory—an echo of the words of another man from Illinois with humble origins who understood the proper role of religion in politics. The spirit Obama embodied today was the same one Abraham Lincoln evoked in the peroration of his greatest speech in 1865:

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

Yes, we can

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Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of the New York Times, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. To learn more, visit charleskaiser.com.

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