Bringing all his triangulation skills to bear, the Senator delicately navigated (he hopes!) a politically safe course through treacherous territory.
The speech is built, sentence by sentence, from 3 main components:
1.) A celebration of American greatness
anxiously followed by
2.) A Carefully worded acknowledgment of 'America's shortcomings'
eventually leading to the meat of the matter
3.) An artfully constructed denunciation of Rev. Wright, crafted to seem like a gentle chastisement of an old friend instead of the ice cold kiss-off it actually is.
Despite deploying more than four thousand words (many of them used for repetition of the main themes), it all happens in pretty quick succession. The overall structure, considering its concern-assuaging purpose, is efficiently crafted.
The stages...
Celebration -
"Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America's improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787."
[...]
Shortcomings -
"The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations."
[...]
Quickly followed, lest anyone become too uncomfortable, by more celebration -
"Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time."
[...]
The use of "perfected" above is clever; it provides the Senator with a very useful thematic hook, the sort of thing crafty screenwriters and movie directors understand. The theme, which is elegantly implied and subtly communicated, is that we aren't 'perfect'...yet, but we are indeed (perhaps unlike other peoples) 'perfectible'. This gives the Senator a safe way to critique the US' record: 'yes,' he says' 'bad things have happened. But look at our direction; it's up!'
Later, Obama completes the circle on his theme of perfectibility -
"This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign - to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren."
[...]
But all of this, and much more besides along the same lines, is merely a prelude to the speech's heart: the rebuke of Rev. Wright's remarks, which fall outside the range of acceptable discourse.
The Senator on how off-the-ranch Wright supposedly is -
"Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems - two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all."
[...]
The Reverand's actual comments (which, as Jerry Monaco showed here - <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20080317/005301.html> can hardly, in the main, be called inaccurate) are unimportant. What's being addressed is an idea - the idea that mentioning uncomfortable information, regardless of truth or error, is "divisive" and "racially charged".
[...]
There's so much more to dig into here but I'll leave it to others who're inclined.
.d.