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Rodriguez: ?Obama?s Brilliant Bad Speech?

Gregory Rodriguez, the almost always interesting syndicated columnist, gets it exactly right in today?s Los Angeles Times:

His rhetoric entangled him in race in exactly the wrong way.

In some ways, Barack Obama?s speech on race last week was as brilliant as it was nuanced. But for all its rhetorical beauty, it was also an enormous step backward and, in the end, a rather self-serving call for more discussion about racial grievance in a country that has already done way too much talking.

Until last week, so much of Obama?s appeal lay in the fact that he was not asking us to talk about the racial divide. Instead, he offered himself as a living and breathing symbol of racial reconciliation; his very origins pointed to the goal of unity and, from his own account, created in him a desire to bring together opposing sides.

Throughout the campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton?s surrogates repeatedly tried to bait Obama into talking about race; they worked to pigeonhole him (and marginalize him) as the ?black candidate.? But in the end, it was Obama?s own alliances that tripped him up and obliged him to directly address a subject (one that he now says we ?cannot afford to ignore?) that he had so deftly avoided ? or as the Obamaphiles had it, transcended. For all the kudos the Illinois senator has received for his candor, the very act of delivering Tuesday?s address was a defeat. Obama was a much more powerful force for racial progress when he so effortlessly symbolized it, rather than when he called on us to address ?old wounds.?

Rodriguez didn?t even like the good part of the speech:

Those who praised the speech did so in part because it acknowledged the grievances that lie on both sides of the nation?s most intractable racial divide. But that?s also what was so wrong with it. The discussion of racial grievance -- and other group grievances -- has long since become an institutionalized part of American life, literally and figuratively. There are advocacy groups, think tanks, foundations and scholars who sometimes have produced groundbreaking work but who also have served to reaffirm the idea that American society is a federation of opposing, static and permanently aggrieved identities. Rather than push us beyond race, the institutionalization of racial identity as defined by grievance perpetuates the divisions of the past. The one new thing Obama?s speech added to the dialogue was the inclusion of whites to the list of aggrieved (and angry) parties.

Oh, wait. Maybe The Speech included an unnoticed trial balloon for a new plank in the emerging platform of Obamian new politics: racial preferences for all races.

Full post as published by Discriminations on March 24, 2008 (boomark / email).