UNITED STATES:Barack Obama may have done enough in his race speech to quell doubts about his links to a controversial black pastor, write Alec MacGillisand Eli Saslowin Washington.
KAY FARLEY, a retired teacher in Denver, decided to support Barack Obama for president because she thought the senator from Illinois had a better chance of being elected than Hillary Clinton. That confidence was shaken last week when incendiary excerpts from sermons by Obama's longtime pastor dominated the airwaves.
So Farley had one question in mind as she watched on television as Obama spoke in Philadelphia on Tuesday: could the candidate whose campaign is premised on lifting the country past its divisions elevate himself above the rift exposed by his former minister?
The speech wowed her. But she recognised in it the constraints Obama faced in condemning the Rev Jeremiah Wright, and wondered whether those alienated by Wright's words would be satisfied.
"He was between the devil and deep blue sea, and he did a good job, but I don't know who is convinced or unconvinced," she said. Of the speech's concluding call for the country to move beyond such divisive debates to confront its common problems, she said: "Would that that were true. Saying it doesn't necessarily make it so."
As skilled on orator as Obama is, he has faced few moments as fraught as Tuesday's. The clips of his longtime spiritual mentor declaring "God damn America" for its mistreatment of blacks and saying that the country had provoked the 9/11 attacks threatened to undermine Obama's promise to bind up racial and political fissures.
Obama needed to address several audiences with the speech: undecided white voters in Pennsylvania, whose Rust Belt cousins Obama struggled to win over in Ohio even before the Wright controversy; African-Americans aggrieved by the opprobrium being heaped on Wright; and staunch supporters such as Farley who needed reassurance about their candidate.
His solution was to grapple broadly with the nation's racial problem, beginning with slavery, and the inequities they produced, but to also acknowledge the roots of some resentment among struggling whites who "don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race".
He admitted a fundamental disagreement with Wright, saying the minister had made a "profound mistake" in doubting the US could be redeemed over time.
He presented himself - the son of a black African and white American, whose own ancestors did not suffer Southern slavery - as uniquely able to rise above the fray.
"We can tackle race only as spectacle," he said. Or, "we can come together and say, 'Not this time'."
The speech drew praise across the political spectrum, though some on the right questioned Obama's assertion that what could unite different races is his liberal agenda. But many who watched the speech wondered whether it would be enough to calm the anger generated by the Wright videos.
Gerald Shuster, a political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh, found the speech "stylistically persuasive" but thought Obama should have moved aggressively to distance himself from Wright months ago, when reports of his harsher sermons first surfaced.
Martin Medhurst, an expert in rhetoric at Baylor University, was struck by the religious intonations, and the echoes of John F Kennedy's 1960 speech on his Catholicism, particularly the summons to overcome divisions to confront common threats.
Would Tuesday's speech be remembered along with Kennedy's?
"If Obama goes on to win the presidency it will," Medhurst said. "If he wins the presidency, this will be seen as a very important speech."
Attending the speech at Constitution Hall was Bill Hamilton, president of the Teamsters' Joint Council 53 in Pennsylvania, whose union has endorsed Obama and has been faced with the challenge of selling him to a blue-collar membership that has been made only more sceptical by Wright's remarks. "Pennsylvania is a very conservative-type state, and the thinking there is very pro-American, so those type of comments could certainly have a negative impact," he said.
But he thought the speech would help repair the damage.
Also reassured were members of the black church community, who worried after Obama's initial denunciations last week that he had forgotten - or, worse, ignored - what drew him to Wright. J Alfred Smith, the senior pastor at Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland, California, and a friend of Wright, clapped in his living room as Obama lauded Wright for "housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day-care services and scholarships and prison ministries".
"There's a lot of anger, but Rev Wright is a human being and Obama finally showed that," he said.
"All of us from that generation had to go around through the back door, had to ride in the segregated portion of the train.
"That anger can keep us mired down in the mud, or it can be creatively used.
"Brother Obama has called for our higher selves to rule over our animalistic selves."
- (LA Times-Washington Post)