The XX Factor: What women really think.

Amen to That

Truly. I was all set to write that we had given Obama a free pass, that we had allowed him to slip away from something the we'd pin on anyone else. Every one-word slip in this campaign—bitch and monster and Jesse Jackson—has been endlessly scrutinized. I myself have hung many an evangelical politician on the words of their pastor. Reading Obama's book, it's impossible to conclude that he has some vicious strain he's hiding from us. Still, I thought we should acknowledge that it means something to choose as your place of worship a Farrakhan-tinged church where the pastor spits out some white-hating, Jew-hating, America-hating poison. 

But then you listen to that speech and it makes you want to weep. Everything I thought was lost in American politics—raw honesty, depth, a natural style, biography un-packaged, un-Disneyfied, and seamlessly matched to meaning, beautiful, unpretentious rhetoric, and whatever is the opposite of pandering to your public—was there in that speech. Amen to that.