I realized something tonight while watching Barack Obama's populist response to the cynical noise and distortion being promulgated by the Clinton and McCain camps over Obama's "bitter" remarks.  In a politics where we've become so accustomed and maybe even resigned to candidates' utter failure to deliver on promises made during the course of a campaign, a very simple and obvious observation had somehow eluded me (or at least my conscious mind) until this very moment. 

Barack Obama is already delivering in spades. 

I guess I shouldn't say I had no idea about this until now.  The grassroots renaissance unearthed by Obama's candidacy, the remarkable primary voter turnout elicited by his run, the unpredecented fundraising numbers drawn from well over a million individual donors.  All of these things have registered clearly in my mind as precedent-shattering.

But in a way these have all felt like procedural accomplishments, positive arithmetical gains from which a possibility of future good could hopefully be extrapolated. 

But tonight, watching Barack Obama draw out and distill with remarkable facility and in the simplest of terms the electoral roots of our nation's economic inequalities of opportunity, the obvious electoral-economic disconnect that for all the years of my adult life dared not speak its name (in mainstream political discourse, at least), I realized that substantive change, and not just procedural potential, is already taking place in our country as a result of Obama's leadership.

Already we've seen the conversation on race in this country turn a corner because of the work Barack Obama is doing, and the challenges he's meeting, and the status quo he's confronting, on the campaign trail.  But it was the recognition by Obama that the root causes of our racial tensions in this country are economic that gave his contribution (so far) to discussions on race its transformative power. 

And tonight we saw the first result of the groundwork he put down in that speech just a few weeks ago.  Because while it's true the fundamental recognition of the root cause--a silenced voice on the issue at the ballot box-- of economic hardship experienced by the vast majority of folks in this country might have been laid out on this occasion for small-town, mostly white, Pennsylvanians, the same diagnosis, in varying degrees of severity I suppose, could be made for so many others.  Across states.    Across genders.  Across religions.  And across races.

Do most presidents truly accomplish even this much change during their terms in office? 

And Obama's not even out of the primary season yet.