PJ Media

These last comments remind us why politicians (and others) so rarely discuss ‘touchy’ subjects: they can open the discussion but of course not resolve it in one speech or even in one long campaign, so they get blamed for the tensions it arouses as if speaking about the problem was CAUSING the problem.

No. we had many and deep racial tensions way before Obama spoke. the idea that they aren’t there as long as no one mentions them is childish–psychologist call it one version of magical thinking (if we just don’t look under the bed the monster isn’t there).
i agree that he sure didn’t ‘ease’ racial tensions, but i don’t think he claimed that was the purpose of that speech or any one speech. the purpose was 1. to get himself out of the hole his Wright connection had landed him in, and 2. to use the occasion to ‘get into it’–to go ahead and start a conversation on these horrible, difficult subjects, knowing full well that he would not come out a winner on every item, or with every listener.

so, discuss away–that is the healthy result of his speech, and his contribution to–well, me and you–that he will get no thanks for, but that has great value nonetheless.

i can’t wait to see what the self-satisfied ‘experts’ here will say about his more recent upsetting speech on how bitter 30 or 40 years of abandonment have left small town working class Americans. i guess the tendency here will be to deny that this bitterness is there, and to ‘blame’ him for mentioning it.
but it is there, and it had better be addressed, and anyone who has spent time in the rust belt–yes, PA is at the belt-buckle of the rust belt–will know what he’s talking about, and will not think the bitterness results from his mentioning it.

obama is no saint, and not yet impressively presidential, but he is a remarkable politician in America for saying what so many have been choosing not to hear for so long.