There has been much discussion and commentary on the speech Obama gave in Philadelphia about race in America. With their characteristic and shameless exuberance (does anyone remember the original Saturday Night Live parody on the media love affair with his candidacy?), the goo-goos in the liberal media have heralded it as akin to a 21st century Gettysburg address. Their reaction was predictable, and I think it can safely be said that speech or no speech, these people, along with Obama's core constituency, were going to vote for Obama under any circumstances.

Obama deserves credit for bringing to the fore honesty in the race discussion. In his speech, he acknowledged the legitimate reality of white resentment about forced busing and affirmative reaction. His speech seemed to put to rest the tactic of claiming that opponents of these policies were nothing but racists. This is a not insignificant accomplishment and Republicans should be thankful for his candor. Who can forget the timorous and cowardly position of the Republican Party during Ward Connerley's Civil Rights Initiative battle in Michigan. Representing the worst of Rockefeller Republicanism, the party elites ran for cover for fear of being tainted as racist by a mainstream media that has never loved Republicans, nor ever will. Perhaps now, with Obama's tacit blessing, the Republican Party can raise the full panoply of conservative issues related to race in American without inordinate fear.

The more fundamental question that all the effusive praise by pundits conveniently obscures is this: was Obama's speech successful in addressing the main reason for giving it. Namely, did he adequately explain his twenty-year association with a racist in a manner sufficient with which to credibly continue his campaign as a racial healer and uniter? On this score, I feel the speech was sadly deficient and Obama demonstrated that he was not equal to the task at hand. Instead of solidifying his bona fides as a uniter and conciliator, his speech represented an explicit attempt to use race in America as a cover for belonging to a church that unabashedly preaches black separatism. Instead of dealing with the issue of the inflammatory anti-American, anti-white rhetoric of his pastor, Obama explicitly approved of Jeremiah Wright's divisive message by using his speech as an exercise in moral equivalence. This is why the thread of post-modern deconstruction, moral equivalence, excuse and justification was interlaced throughout his entire speech. Instead of dealing head-on with the existence of African-American paranoia expressed by the shocking number of his fellow parishioners that genuinely believe that the federal government is injecting the HIV virus into the black community. He claims that "we are all racists", so the proselytizing of such wacky conspiracy theories is justified by a uniquely black american "reality" that cannot be understood or experienced by whites. Such deconstructionist post-modernism, which supplies the philosophical underpinnings for the far-left of the Democratic Party, is largely responsible for the deterioration in our public discourse. This isn't progress, but rather, constitutes an appalling regression in our ability to conduct a reasoned and philosophical debate within a civil society.

Through his speech, Obama successfully and unmistakably established his credentials as a hard-left doctrinaire liberal. In the process, it is apparent that his halo as a uniter has been badly tarnished. For, in the end, his "solution" for racial healing is an invocation for more of the same Great Society, Big Government programs, which to a very large degree are responsible for many of the plagues that ills the African-American community. It is very much old wine in new bottles; hardly, the revolutionary stuff of which New Messiah's are made.