Who can deny the boldness and brilliance shown here by Obama in confronting head-on what has perhaps been the greatest single wound to the viability of progressive politics and the Democratic Party for the last thirty years:

<blockquote>In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.</blockquote>

I knew Obama possessed this kind of nuanced understanding before this speech. It resonates deeply in me having come up from white, blue-collar roots. This is the theme Obama needs to continue using to reach and close the deal with many of the traditional Dem blocks who've been sticking with Hillary.

Wright's rant (and Obama's ascendancy generally) is exposing some deeply conflicted feelings many blacks have about "America" the symbol. Obama has to make history by both acknowledging the history of these African-American sentiments and sowing the means for Americans en masse to accept and transcend it.

Obama holds a lead among college-educated whites (like myself) because we have seen this coming and already have an accepting understanding, whereas non-college-educated whites (like many of my relatives) will, while not being wholly racist, have great difficulty reconciling the vitriol they hear from Wright with the idea that Obama is himself mainstream enough to represent all of America. It is a legitimate philosophical question.

Of course anyone with enough perspective on Obama understands he CAN represent all of America, but he has to seize the Wright problem, articulate better how he transcends the radical Wright perspective, and ensure the confidence of the broad swath of Americans. Its a big challenge, but it is part of what he had to know would be an inevitable dimension of his path to the presidency.