Spin Cycle

Barack Obama's big speech, in which he will try to address the Jeremiah Wright issue and larger questions of race, is scheduled for 10:15 in Philadelphia.

It is being portrayed as hugely important, needed to stop a slow-moving earthquake that threatens to transform the way people view him, undercut the person-and-character based rationale for his candidacy and cause Democrats to question his electability.

In a sense, though, it's hard to see how this speech changes the course. In a blog posting and a series of TV appearances on Friday, he tried to put the issue to rest by saying that he didn't know about the particular inflammatory sermons that had caused such an uproar, and repudiating them, but refusing to repudiate his long-time pastor as a person or leave the church he's been a part of for most of his adulthood.

If that didn't kill the story, what can he say this morning that will? Although there's no proof of his particular presence on the day of a particular sermon, there's skepticism that he didn't know about the Afro-centric and at times inflammatory rhetoric of his pastor. It has been noted that he chose not to have Wright with him at the time of his presidential announcement -- a sign he was aware even then that the pastor's rhetoric could be a problem. In his book Dreams of My Father, Obama quotes a Wright sermon in which he says "white folks' greed runs a world in need."

So, how does a speech today get him past this? The only question is how deeply it will undercut him. What he needs is probably a more nuanced -- and honest -- description of his relationship to Wright's political philosophy, which is at the root of his rhetoric, instead of arguing that he didn't know about it.

For all the posturing on the right, lots of people disagree with what they hear in church. Lots of Catholics, for one example, disagree with teachings on birth control and/or abortion and/or the role of women and/or homosexuality that they hear from the pulpit and from Rome. They don't quit the church because it's part of who they are.

The problem for Obama is that he has cast himself as post-racial, a black candidate who did not trigger white guilt. The Clinton campaign has spent a couple of months -- especially Bill in South Carolina -- trying to cast him as just a black candidate, with electability issues among white ethnics. His wife Michelle made a remark about being proud of America for the "first time," which seemed to echo her pastor.

And, inflammatory rhetoric aside, the social gospel Wright preached -- which Obama has not repudiated -- seemed to put a lot of blame on America and racism. The blame may be deserved, but it has triggered what Obama didn't trigger before -- guilt, and resentment. So now there's confusion about who Obama really is.

Here's NPR commentator Juan Williams, noting that Obama embraced Wright when he wanted to be a successful black politician in Chicago, but now is distancing himself from Wright when he wants to be a success post-racial national politician:

"It speaks to his character, and it speaks to the judgment which is the basis on which Barack Obama has been running his campaign. So I think it could be a big problem....I want to know you. I want to know what you think and who you are. And in this case, I realize I don't."