Jon, it'll be nice if Obama's speech can de-racialize the discourse of the campaign. But he certainly didn't take the most direct way to that end, which would have been to argue for minimizing the significance of the "racial tiffs," that they represent the views of minorities and are unrelated to what his broader campaign is about, etc. He didn't do that. He deepened their significance, making both Ferraro and Wright stand-ins for big communities within the American body politic.
Here's what struck me as the key passage of Obama's speech, related to the passage he cited:
This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so na