> Another drop in the signal-to-noise ratio.
And here's a brief contribution to pull it further down the gutter.
Taking it at face value, Obama's speech is a step in the right direction. In many ways. Obama's speech stretches some liberal tenets to their extreme. Actually, it turns them upside down, although at this point the turning is merely rhetorical. To be more specific, the idea of unity across racial lines, without denying the objective sources of racial animosity at the rank-and-file level, is essential to any further significant advance in the interests of working people. So, I don't think Obama's speech has made the gap between liberal politics and independent working-class action any wider than it already was.
(And taking a speech at face value -- for what is worth in content and form -- is not necessarily naive. It's more like Occam's razor, not bad as a first approximation at least.)
In actually-existing U.S. politics (as opposed to one's ideological fantasies), the speech is definitely not a step backwards. It's silly to put a minus wherever the liberals put a plus. To prove what to whom? Ruling out a sequence of miracles, in the U.S. (as in most other places), independent working-class politics will only evolve -- at first gradually and then by leaps -- out of the most conventional, liberal political movement. In a liberal political movement, through a liberal political movement, and then in opposition to liberalism as the ideology of the political movement. The role of the left (regardless of whether the left is a bunch of disconnected individuals or a more coherent political force) should not be to merely contemplate or -- worse -- seek to derail that political movement because it's current self-image is liberal. But I won't repeat what I've said before...
The speech also had a direct, immediate political goal. How effective it'll prove to be in accomplishing that goal is yet to be decided. Via youtube and more generally the net, Obama is reaching people directly, but -- I believe -- that the immediate goal was to challenge the political press, to have them pay some price for stirring up against him the deep-seated racial prejudices of the white populace. Preempting that divisive move is a huge progressive step in U.S. politics, I believe. (The idea of Black-White unity is something that Charles Brown has emphasized here, I think.)
Not unmodified, but largely the judgments of the political press filter down to the rest of the media, and that contributes heavily to shaping up, framing the public perception. I don't see how Obama could have played this better than he did. But we'll see how things play out.