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Red, Blue, Black, White, Gray
I'm with Maureen Dowd today: The Obama who talks of grays and of complicated legacies and long evolutions, not just of high hopes and change, is my kind of guy. See, there's a reason the campaign isn't over yet—we need to see this man dealing with more than adoring crowds. And he's clearly thinking not just narrowly and strategically about the superdelegate count, but broadly about what the pattern of his primary successes and failures so far tells us about the country. This speech was a response to more than a flap over Rev. Wright, I would say. It was Obama's admirable effort to speak to an electoral puzzle that Matt Bai pointed out in a fascinating piece in the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday. "To put this simply," Bai wrote, "Obama wins in major urban areas but can't seem to win in urbanized states, while Clinton wins in rural communities but consistently loses in rural states. Why?" Bai proposed a counterintuitive answer that says something important about race in America: Obama does well in areas with the least racial diversity—where there are either lots of African-American voters or very few (Wisconsin and Vermont). The actual experience of racial diversity—of living side by side, feeling hard-pressed, struggling, and competing for "a piece of the American Dream," especially during an economic downturn—may not build enlightened racial unity, but instead fuel skepticism about facile promises of harmony. It was exactly that sobering reality that Obama addressed head on in his speech. I call that audacity.
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