I believe that my guy’s speech entitled “A More Perfect Union” will be remembered as one of the great speeches — not as a lecture by a religious leader or public intellectual or social critic might be remembered, but as a great speech by a great politican. It does the things a political speech has to do. Chiefly, it addresses itself to all the various stakeholders who own a piece of any argument about race that is made in the public sphere in this country. And it attempts to avoid pitting one group against another.

If I have a criticism it is that I wish Obama’s statement had given his former pastor more benefit of the doubt, and I admire Obama’s refusal to repudiate his friendship. Pastor Wright’s language is perfectly understandable to me as prophetic utterance, even the claim that Jesus was black. His paraphrase of “God Bless America” is spot on, in my opinion, as a critique of the common chauvinistic use of that song to valorize the worst about our country. His claim that the events of September 11, 2001 were the result of US policy is a claim that was made by many others at the time (cf. Amiri Baraka‘s “Somebody Blew Up America,” for instance).

Still, I think this is Obama’s best and most statesmanlike speech to date in the campaign. Here’s a passage close to the heart of it, perhaps:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

I’ve just finished Shelby Steele’s book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, and I think Steele’s analysis goes a long way towards explaining what has just happened in the public drama that is the democratic presidential primary. I don’t agree with Steele’s sharp critique of Jeremiah Wright (of whom he offers a fairly long characterization without once mentioning his name), and I suspect that Steele’s title was one of those dishonest titles editors sometimes stick on books in order to sell them. But Steele’s overall argument about the roles various black leaders play in our present-day racist society seems right to me.

Steele describes Obama as a bargainer, one who gives whites the benefit of the doubt. In this Obama is different from challengers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Both bargainers and challengers provide whites with what Steele calls innocence, or absolution for the sin of racism. Steele further argues that Obama has achieved the status of “iconic negro,” a cultural category that includes such figures as Sidney Poitier and Oprah Winfrey, and for which bargaining is a prerequisite.

It is in this way that Obama is a bound man, in Steele’s view. The mask he wears as a bargainer limits him to being a merely representative man. “His supporters do not look to him to do something; they look to him to be something, to represent something.”

Barack Obama emerged into a political culture that needed him more as an icon than as a man. He has gone far because the need is great. But this easy appeal has also been his downfall. It is a seduction away from character and conviction.

But in the present speech, Obama characterized this iconic function as “the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap,” and emphasized his campaign’s dedication to solving the country’s pressing problems. Here is how a Washington Post editorial puts it today:

Mr. Obama’s speech was an extraordinary moment of truth-telling. He coupled it with an appeal that this year’s campaign not be dominated by distorted and polarizing debates about whether he or his opponents agree with extreme statements by supporters — or other attempts to divide the electorate along racial lines. Far better, he argued, that Americans of all races recognize they face common economic, social and security problems.

And in speaking of solutions to specifically racial problems Obama gave significant mention to the “quintessentially American — and yes, conservative — notion of self-help,” a tip of the hat, perhaps, to Steele and Bill Cosby.

I can’t accept Steele’s apparent conclusion that Obama is trapped, for the same reason Obama gives for rejecting Jeremiah Wright’s pessimism about our country. Steele seems to speak as Wright does, as though our society is static, to paraphrase Obama, as though we live in a society that is not only racist but unalterably so.

But I’m not sure how wedded Steele may be to this conclusion, since he ends his book almost on an upbeat, suggesting that all along he has been speaking not in absolutes but about what Obama has to overcome.

The challenge for Barack Obama is the same as it is for all free people, to achieve visibility as an individual, to in fact become an individual rather than a racial cipher.

At the beginning of the last chapter of A Bound Man Steele asks a question that I think is central to this little book. “[W]hat would a black who was neither a challenger nor a bargainer look like?” I think Barack Obama is every day of this campaign showing us that, as he continues his critique of the Iraq war, as he absorbs negative attacks, seems to learn from his mistakes and grow in judgment, and as he continues with his message of unity in the face of a determined effort by his opponents to racialize him.

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Steele’s title calls to my mind Ilse Aichinger’s wonderful little story entitled “The Bound Man” — I don’t know whether Steele intends a reference. Aichinger’s story is about a man who has been robbed and beaten, and left tied up with a rope. Through a series of experiments he learns to work with his bound condition and the constraints it imposes, and through doing so he aquires a freedom he has never before experienced. “The freedom he enjoyed in this struggle was having to adapt every movement of his limbs to the rope that tied him — the freedom of panthers, wolves, and the wild flowers that sway in the evening breeze.” When he is liberated from the rope in the end, he understands his unbound condition as a loss that in the specific circumstances of the story will lead to death.

I think Obama’s individuality consists in a complex and dynamic adaptation to the constraints imposed by a particular situatedness. I think his relationship with Pastor Wright has likely played an important role in that adaptation, a role akin, perhaps, to the role Ezra Pound played in the life of T. S. Eliot. But the adaptation is Obama’s own, I believe, as Eliot’s was. Of course Eliot was not a politician. Obama has lived an unusually creative life for a politician thusfar, and that’s more a measure of the risk he takes than anything else. However, and in this I think I agree with my friend Timothy Burke, Obama’s creativity is tempered by a fairly hard-edged pragmatism. And I would add that pragmatism is sometimes a willingness to make small claims as one attempts to achieve large goals. For the rest, I think Tim says it very well:

This is what politics is, what politics has to be. This is what transformation needs. Otherwise, the best you can hope for are momentary, transient achievements that are destined to be reversed almost as soon as they are accomplished. There isn’t enough power in the greatest political mobilization imaginable to abolish significant groups of people who experience history and society differently than you and people like you experience it.

— Politics as a spiritual condition, a certain of generosity of spirit. Maybe Pastor Wright will make it into the more perfect union after all.