By now, if you've read a newspaper or watched any television coverage today, you've heard about Senator Obama's speech on race today.  If you haven't gotten a chance to read or watch it, you can do both here.  I highly recommend reviewing it yourself.

It was, in many ways, a brilliantly written and delivered speech—something we've come to expect, of course, from Barack Obama.  It did an excellent job of providing context for the black experience in America, explaining how the average African-American could gravitate to a controversial church like Jeremiah Wright's, and how those experiences might understandably be misunderstood by white America.  It took a stab at uniting the black and white American experiences under the common problem of economic anxiety, brought on by the real enemy of working people in our country: unfettered corporate greed.  In this regard, the speech still should have gone much further.  More on that in a minute.

It was a brave speech.  Barack Obama has been running as a post-racial candidate this entire election cycle.  Today, he turned into the wind, and tackled the racial crimes, conundrums, and tragedies that have buffeted our nation since its inception.  Obama challenged our country to deal with the race issue in the here and now, to no longer keep this conversation tucked away in our racially homogeneous tribes, where our separate white and black safety zones allow us to say what we really think about the other.  

He did so knowing that after today, there is no going back.  As an unnamed Obama adviser was quoted as saying, "Race is now officially on the table.  It’s not going away after this,”.  Race will be a part of his candidacy for the remainder of the primary, and, if he is so lucky, the general election.  This is not something Obama wanted to happen, but at this point in the midst of the Wright controversy, it is obvious he felt he had little choice.  Even braver, rather than offering banalities on unity and togetherness, he picked at some of the ugliest scabs in our national discourse, in effect claiming that his candidacy possesses the unifying power to do so without making the wounds worse.

That said, while I feel that the speech was a rhetorical victory, I am worried that in certain ways, it was a missed opportunity, and possibly a political failure.

The speech can be judged by who its intended audience was, and who it ended up becoming.  His intended audience should have been the white blue collar males that, after the Virginia primary, were flooding towards his candidacy, but after Ohio, and Jeremiah Wright, have been flooding away from it.

Instead, the speech seemed more tailored towards the media, and Obama's base.  Political journalists have swooned over it all day long.  Chris Matthews probably had to change his pants twice on Hardball tonight, calling it "the greatest speech on civil rights in our nation's history". 

It's a fine civil rights speech, and deserves much praise, but Barack Obama is not running to make a point, or win the argument about race in this country.  He is not running for Civil Rights Leader of America.  He is running for President of the United States.  In a country with a still-white majority population, the two are unfortunately incompatible.

Fascinating frames like the following are crack for the media:

"I can no more disown him (Wright) 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."

Brilliant, honest, touching, hard-hitting stuff.  But is it really helpful to his political prospects?  I love the parallel.  The entire blogging unit of The Huffington Post loves the parallel.  His base of young white liberals and African-Americans loves it more than anyone.

But I've since heard more than a handful of other white folks—on both the left and right—say things like, "that wasn't a very nice thing to say about his poor old grandmother."  Instead of getting the intent of the story—to remind people that Obama's experience is actually as a black and white man—a lot of white blue-collar folks hear that anecdote and think how rude it was for this young black man to say that about that poor old white woman.  Plus, they're reminded about how they too, sometimes get scared around young black men.  And soul-searching introspection on those feelings is likely not their next step. 

As Obama himself said today, "I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own."  So why is he attempting to do that very thing at its greatest crisis point?

I've even heard from some Democrats—yes, Democrats—who say maybe it was Obama's resentment of his white grandmother's attitudes towards blacks, that led him to a racially charged church like Jeremiah Wright's.  I think such arguments are absurd and deeply narrow-minded.  Unfortunately, so is the state of typical white racial thinking in this country.

What Obama also did not do with the speech was explain why he spent 20 years listening to a pastor condemn America, hate on white people, and spit on Israel.  That's not what's really been happening the last 20 years in the Trinity Church of Christ, of course, but it effectively is what much of white America has come to believe. 

Yes, Obama described Wright's outlook as "a profoundly distorted view of this country".  And yes, Obama explained that Wright is more than the sum of these snippets of controversy: "The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor." 

Fine.  The retort I hear then is why does Wright say the U.S. government gave AIDS to black people?

What the speech really needed to do today was, at length, directly address the economic considerations from on high that have intentionally spurred the racial divisions in our country since the American Revolution.  It needed to be, in many ways, his Howard Zinn speech. 

It was good for Obama to start by empathizing with lower-income white Americans who feel robbed by affirmative action, who see no special value in their own white skin, who "don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race."  But the argument stopped with empathy.  It is absolutely critical that if you venture into why lower-income whites are resentful of affirmative action, you must complete the circle by explaining how our corrupt economic system requires whites to focus their anger on tiny programs like affirmative action, rather than the massive, non-racial corporate forces that are taking away black and white jobs, black and white health care, black and white homes.

The reason Obama must focus primarily on economics, rather than race, is that with two wars being fought abroad, a looming recession, a housing crisis, trade deals shipping our entire manufacturing base overseas, blue-collar white Democrats really don't feel the urgent need to solve this race problem in America.  It is, unfortunately, probably the last issue on the plate—if it's even on the plate. 

With one candidate focusing his attention on a controversial topic, which, though eloquently discussed, isn't at the top of voters' concerns, which other candidate is poised to jump right into an opening on the economy?  Yep.

But, you say, Obama had to address this Wright controversy—it was eating his candidacy alive!  I completely agree.  The way in which I believe he would have been better served is by unifying the discussion of race more fully with the economic pressures that have caused these racial fractures in American life in the first place.  It was still a brilliant speech.  He has retaken the news cycle—no small feat after what he's been through the last couple of weeks.  But it's just a news cycle, and the questions will continue to linger among lower-income white voters about Obama's racially questionable church-going. 

It's not fair that Barack Obama should be judged by what Rev. Wright has occasionally said.  But as life is not fair, many white voters still will do so.

He is still the front-runner for the nomination, and will still likely obtain it.  The problem isn't with getting the nomination—it's how does he defeat a cultural icon like John McCain in the general election without grabbing a big share of independent white votes in swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Missouri. 

His current base—young, affluent educated whites, and black voters—can't bring him over the finish line.  And if he is ever going to silence the critics who say he is all hope and no results, he is going to have to throw some serious economic red meat on the table—sooner, rather than later.  If he cannot get away from the race discussion, he must drag it over to the economic one.

My advice?  Call John Edwards, and start the rewrites.  Pennsylvania is a month away.