New Generation Moves Forward, Horrifying the Hateful

The wonder of June is the new generations growing ever so fast, in which we see hope, fascination and pure joy.

A niece is moving onto High School, already a critical thinker and natural lover of life.

When sent the shots of the young moving forward with their lives: Accepting, loving, so excited to look around and see people as friends and fellows, not enemies to divide and conquer, not ever, hope does spring eternal.

Congrats, young Tori and all your friends, live your lives:

Necessary to quote Russell: "Those whose lives are fruitful to themselves, to their friends, or to the world are inspired by hope and sustained by joy: they see in imagination the things that might be and the way in which they are to be brought into existence. In their private relations they are not preoccupied with anxiety lest they should lose such affection and respect as they receive: they are engaged in giving affection and respect freely, and the reward comes of itself without their seeking. In their work they are not haunted by jealousy of competitors, but concerned with the actual matter that has to be done. In politics, they do not spend time and passion defending unjust privileges of their class or nation, but they aim at making the world as a whole happier, less cruel, less full of conflict between rival greeds, and more full of human beings whose growth has not been dwarfed and stunted by oppression."
- Bertrand Russell
Proposed Roads To Freedom
(1918, Cornwall Press, Inc, Cornwall NY)

Ellsberg on Howard Zinn

A Memory of Howard
Jan 27, 2010
By Daniel Ellsberg

I just learned that my friend Howard Zinn died today. Earlier this morning, I was being interviewed by the Boston Phoenix, in connection with the February release of a documentary in which he is featured prominently. The interviewer asked me who my own heroes were, and I had no hesitation in answering, first, “Howard Zinn.”

Just weeks ago, after watching the film, I woke up thinking that I had never told him how much he meant to me. For once in my life, I acted on that thought in a timely way. I sent him an e-mail in which I said, among other things, what I had often told others: that he was, “in my opinion, the best human being I’ve ever known. The best example of what a human can be, and can do with their life.”

Our first meeting was at Faneuil Hall in Boston in early 1971, where we both spoke against the indictments of Eqbal Ahmad and Phil Berrigan for “conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger.” We marched with the rest of the crowd to make citizens’ arrests at the Boston office of the FBI.

Later that spring, we went with our affinity group (including Noam Chomsky, Cindy Fredericks, Marilyn Young, Mark Ptashne, Zelda Gamson, Fred Branfman and Mitch Goodman), to the May Day actions blocking traffic in Washington (“If they won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government”). Howard tells that story in the film, and I tell it at greater length in my memoir, “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.”

But for reasons of space, I had to cut out the next section in which Howard—who had been arrested in D.C. after most of the rest of us had gone elsewhere—came back to Boston for a rally and a blockade of the Federal Building. I’ve never published that story, so here it is, an outtake from my manuscript:

A day later, Howard Zinn was the last speaker at a large rally in Boston Common. I was at the back of a huge crowd, listening to him over loudspeakers. Twenty-seven years later, I can remember some of what he said. “On May Day in Washington, thousands of us were arrested for disturbing the peace. But there is no peace. We were really arrested because we were disturbing the war.”

He said, “If Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton had been walking the streets of Georgetown yesterday, they would have been arrested. Arrested for being young.”

At the end of his comments, he said: “I want to speak now to some of the members of this audience, the plainclothes policemen among us, the military intelligence agents who are assigned to do surveillance. You are taking the part of secret police, spying on your fellow Americans. You should not be doing what you are doing. You should rethink it, and stop. You do not have to carry out orders that go against the grain of what it means to be an American.”

Those last weren’t his exact words, but that was the spirit of them. He was to pay for that comment the next day, when we were sitting side by side in a blockade of the Federal Building in Boston. We had a circle of people all the way around the building, shoulder to shoulder, so no one could get in or out except by stepping over us. Behind us were crowds of people with posters who were supporting us but who hadn’t chosen to risk arrest. In front of us, keeping us from getting any closer to the main entrance to the building, was a line of policemen, with a large formation of police behind them. All the police had large plastic masks tilted back on their heads and they were carrying long black clubs, about four feet long, like large baseball bats. Later the lawyers told us that city police regulations outlawed the use of batons that long.

But at first the relations with the police were almost friendly. We sat down impudently at the very feet of the policemen who were guarding the entrance, filling in the line that disappeared around the sides until someone came from the rear of the building and announced over a bullhorn, “The blockade is complete. We’ve surrounded the building!” There was a cheer from the crowd behind us, and more people joined us in sitting until the circle was two or three deep.
We expected them to start arresting us, but for a while the police did nothing. They could have manhandled a passage through the line and kept it open for employees to go in or out, but for some reason they didn’t. We thought maybe they really sympathized with our protest, and this was their way of joining in. As the morning wore on, people took apples and crackers and bottles of water out of their pockets and packs and shared them around, and they always offered some to the police standing in front of us. The police always refused, but they seemed to appreciate the offer.

Then one of the officers came over to Howard and said, “You’re Professor Zinn, aren’t you?” Howard said yes, and the officer reached down and shook his hand enthusiastically. He said, “I heard you lecture at the Police Academy. A lot of us here did. That was a wonderful lecture.” Howard had been asked to speak to them about the role of dissent and civil disobedience in American history. Several other policemen came over to pay their respects to Howard and thank him for his lecture. The mood seemed quite a bit different from Washington.

Then a line of employees emerged from the building, wearing coats and ties or dresses. Their arms were raised and they were holding cards in their raised hands. As they circled past us, they held out the cards so we could see what they were: ID cards, showing they were federal employees. They were making the peace sign with their other hands, they were circling around the building to show solidarity with what we were doing. Their spokesman said over a bullhorn, “We want this war to be over, too! Thank you for what you are doing! Keep it up.”

Photographers, including police, were scrambling to take pictures of them, and some of them held up their ID cards so they would get in the picture. It was the high point of the day.
A little while after the employees had gone back inside the building, there was a sudden shift in the mood of the police. An order had been passed. The bloc of police in the center of the square got into tight formation and lowered their plastic helmets. The police standing right in front of us, over us, straightened up, adjusted their uniforms and lowered their masks. Apparently the time had come to start arrests. The supporters who didn’t want to be arrested fell back.

But there was no arrest warning. There was a whistle, and the line of police began inching forward, black batons raised upright. They were going to walk through us or over us, push us back. The man in front of us, who had been talking to Howard about his lecture a little earlier, muttered to us under his breath, “Leave! Now! Quick, get up.” He was warning, not menacing us.

Howard and I looked at each other. We’d come expecting to get arrested. It didn’t seem right to just get up and move because someone told us to, without arresting us. We stayed where we were. No one else left either. Boots were touching our shoes. The voice over our heads whispered intensely, “Move! Please. For God’s sake, move!” Knees in uniform pressed our knees. I saw a club coming down. I put my hands over my head, fists clenched, and a four-foot baton hit my wrist, hard. Another one hit my shoulder.

I rolled over, keeping my arms over my head, got up and moved back a few yards. Howard was being hauled off by several policemen. One had Howard’s arms pinned behind him, another had jerked his head back by the hair. Someone had ripped his shirt in two, there was blood on his bare chest. A moment before he had been sitting next to me, and I waited for someone to do the same to me, but no one did. I didn’t see anyone else getting arrested. But no one was sitting anymore, the line had been broken, disintegrated. Those who had been sitting hadn’t moved very far, they were standing like me a few yards back, looking around, holding themselves where they’d been clubbed. The police had stopped moving. They stood in a line, helmets still down, slapping their batons against their hands. Their adrenaline was still up, but they were standing in place.

Blood was running down my hand, covering the back of my hand. I was wearing a heavy watch, and it had taken the force of the blow. The baton had smashed the crystal and driven pieces of glass into my wrist. Blood was dripping off my fingers. Someone gave me a handkerchief to wrap around my wrist and told me to raise my arm. The handkerchief got soaked quickly and blood was running down my arm while I looked for a first-aid station that was supposed to be at the back of the crowd, in a corner of the square. I finally found it, and someone picked the glass out of my arm and put a thick bandage around it.

I went back to the protest. My shoulder was aching. The police were standing where they had stopped, and the blockade had reformed, people were sitting 10 yards back from where they had been before. There seemed to be more people sitting, not fewer. Many of the supporters had joined in. But it was quiet. No one was speaking loudly, no laughing. People were waiting for the police to move forward again. They weren’t expecting any longer to get arrested.

Only three or four people had been picked out of the line to be arrested before. The police had made a decision (it turned out) to arrest only the “leaders,” not to give us the publicity of arrests and trials. Howard hadn’t been an organizer of this action, he was just participating like the rest of us, but from the way they treated him when they pulled him out of the line, his comments directly to the police in the rally the day before must have rubbed someone the wrong way.

I found Roz Zinn, Howard’s wife, sitting in the line on the side at right angles to where Howard and I had been before. I sat down between her and their housemate, a woman her age. They had been in support before until they had seen what happened to Howard.

Looking at the police in formation, with their uniforms and clubs, guns on their hips, I felt naked. I knew that it was an illusion in combat to think you were protected because you were carrying a weapon, but it was an illusion that worked. For the first time, I was very conscious of being unarmed. At last, in my own country, I understood what a Vietnamese villager must have felt at what the Marines called a “county fair,” when the Marines rounded up everyone they could find in a hamlet—all women, children and old people never draft- or VC-age young men—to be questioned one at a time in a tent, meanwhile passing out candy to the kids and giving vaccinations. Winning hearts and minds, trying to recruit informers. No one among the villagers knowing what the soldiers, in their combat gear, would do next, or which of them might be detained.

We sat and talked and waited for the police to come again. They lowered their helmets and formed up. The two women I was with were both older than I was. I moved my body in front of them, to take the first blows. I felt a hand on my elbow. “Excuse me, I was sitting there,” the woman who shared the Zinns’ house said to me, with a cold look. She hadn’t come there that day and sat down, she told me later, to be protected by me. I apologized and scrambled back, behind them.

No one moved. The police didn’t move, either. They stood in formation facing us, plastic masks over their faces, for quite a while. But they didn’t come forward again. They had kept open a passage in front for the employees inside to leave after 5, and eventually the police left, and we left.
* * *
There was a happier story to tell, slightly more than one month later. On Saturday night, June 12, 1971, we had a date with Howard and Roz to see “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” in Harvard Square. But that morning I learned from someone at The New York Times that—without having alerted me—The Times was about to start publishing the top secret documents I had given them that evening. That meant I might get a visit from the FBI at any moment; and for once, I had copies of the papers in my apartment, because I planned to send them to Sen. Mike Gravel for his filibuster against the draft.
From “Secrets” (p. 386):

“I had to get the documents out of our apartment. I called the Zinns, who had been planning to come by our apartment later to join us for the movie, and asked if we could come by their place in Newton [Mass.] instead. I took the papers in a box in the trunk of our car. They weren’t the ideal people to avoid attracting the attention of the FBI. Howard had been in charge of managing antiwar activist Daniel Berrigan’s movements underground while he was eluding the FBI for months (so from that practical point of view he was an ideal person to hide something from them), and it could be assumed that his phone was tapped, even if he wasn’t under regular surveillance. However, I didn’t know whom else to turn to that Saturday afternoon. Anyway, I had given Howard a large section of the study already, to read as a historian; he’d kept it in his office at Boston University. As I expected, they said yes immediately. Howard helped me bring up the box from the car.

“We drove back to Harvard Square for the movie. The Zinns had never seen ‘Butch Cassidy’ before. It held up for all of us. Afterward we bought ice-cream cones at Brigham’s and went back to our apartment. Finally Howard and Roz went home before it was time for the early edition of the Sunday New York Times to arrive at the subway kiosk below the square. Around midnight Patricia and I went over to the square and bought a couple of copies. We came up the stairs into Harvard Square reading the front page, with the three-column story about the secret archive, feeling very good.”

- Daniel Ellsberg is a lecturer, writer and activist and the former American military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who, in 1971, released the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times.

SC Whites Ruling Has No "Staying Power," Says Ginsberg

Update: From the NAACP: "Today's decision in Ricci v. DeStefano is a step backward from the goal of equal employment opportunity. A narrow majority of the Court created a new legal standard that places additional hurdles in front of employers seeking to fulfill their obligations under this nation's core antidiscrimination law. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) is disappointed that five Justices departed from well-established precedents that were properly applied by the courts below."

More evidence that the U.S. Supreme Court has drifted into never-never land on matters of race.

In Ricci v. DeStefano (07-1428 & 08-328), the white firefighters case, the Roberts-led court again proposes a nation where racism against blacks is a distant memory.

Another 5-4 majority opinion for the rightwing imagination, this time written by Justice Kennedy.

Justice Ginsberg is harsh in her dissent.

"The Court’s order and opinion, I anticipate, will not have staying power. ... The Court’s recitation of the facts leaves out important parts of the story," said Justice Ginsberg in her opinion read from the bench.

Kennedy, 73, is a swing vote who has mostly voted with the Court's Soviet bloc - Roberts-Alito-Thomas-Scalia - on cases involving race.

Voting Rights Ruling: No Racism Anymore

Social conditions on race are what the GOP says, not the Democratic-led Congress, and certainly not empirical data.

GOP hack Chief Justice John Roberts believes racism went the way of electronic vacuum tubes and during his tenure will seek to impose this belief on any area of law that he can.

That's the political reality under which the Voting Rights Act (VRA), Section Five was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday.

Passing the Voting Rights Act in 2006, Congress concluded racism exists. Wrong, the GOP says.

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) opinion is being hailed and bashed. But the Court [at least five members] makes clear it disagrees with the VRA's assumption about prevailing racism.

John Nichols sees the opinion pulling the teeth from the Voting Rights Act.

NAACP's John Payton and the ACLU's Steven R. Shapiro applaud the Court for preserving the Act and are grateful the Court rules on narrow grounds, instead of eviscerating the Act as the GOP wants.

But narrow grounds are the best the GOP could get because the GOP-desired opinion won't write—there is no intellectually honest reasoning for the desired opinion that overturns section five of the Voting Rights Act.

Overturning Section Five, the Court would have made Bush v. Gore in comparison a model of rigorous reasoning and apolitical detachment.

So the GOP judges did what they could: Chief Justice Roberts offers his GOP view of racial history and implausibly reinterpretes the Voting Rights statute to mean what the Court says, laying the grounds for a future GOP challenge.

The four rule-of-law judges went along because that's the best that they could get and Roberts threw them some language about the good that the Voting Rights Act has accomplished.

As noted by Tom Goldstein in SCOTUSblog, the "case that went before the Court was a vehicle chosen expressly to pose the constitutional question" by activist lawyers who believe that contrary to what Congress said [in reauthorizing the act by votes of 390 to 33 in the House and 98 to 0 in the Senate in 2006 for 25 years], there is no need for the Act.

The constitutional question at hand is whether Congress overstepped its authority in deciding the Act is still needed.

But it's Congress' conclusion that racism exists that has the GOP upset.

The Court’s opinion says that Section 5 'imposes current burdens and must be justified by current needs.' And that the "statute’s coverage formula is based on data that is now more than 35 years old,” and “there is considerable evidence that it fails to account for current political conditions." (NYT) This ignores the mountain of data that Congress used to justify reauthorization.

The GOP Court will go along with the GOP as much as it can without completely embarrassing itself.

McCain Using Race Now

Update: Affirmative distraction
via mal contends - Jesse Helms and the Southern Strategy live.

John McCain just cannot resist that old-time religion used by the GOP in fighting general election presidential campaigns: Race as a wedge issue.

Obama says McCain flip-flops by opposing affirmative action reads a McClatchy headline on a piece by William Douglas, though a more instructive headline is that: McCain did flip-flop on affirmative action.

That flip-flop is a fact, and should be reported as such.

Writes Douglas:

McCain, speaking on ABC's 'This Week,' said he backs a proposed ballot initiative in Arizona that would prohibit affirmative action policies by state and local governments. ... McCain's endorsement was an apparent shift on affirmative action. ... He opposed a 1998 resolution in the Arizona legislature that asked voters to eliminate most preferences based on race, gender or ethnic origin. ... 'Rather than engage in divisive ballot initiatives, we must have a dialogue and cooperation and mutual efforts together to provide every child in America to fulfill their expectations,' (McCain) said at the time.

As Jamin Raskin has written, opponents of equality of opportunity have been arguing since reconstruction that blacks just need to help themselves and have only themselves to blame for any lack of achievement in America.

The critics of affirmative action invite us to believe that we live in a color-blind society in which the last vestige of racial discrimination is affirmative action itself. ... To transcend the destructive politics of division and derision surrounding affirmative action (if we still can), we need to reaffirm the equality of all peoples in a culturally pluralist society and to posit a universal politics of freedom and equality for the next century. But a vigorous defense of affirmative action right now is central to such a politics. For in a society where the lines of race and gender double as lines of class and power, even the idea of affirmative action for minorities and women is an affront to the structure of domination and inequality. Our job must be to make affirmative action the first line of defense in a politics which insists that all citizens have a right to equal participation in the fruits of our social life.

I'm sure a desperate John McCain will have no qualms about using race, overtly and through subliminal message impressions, as a means of staving off a rout in November.

Jobless? Losing your standard of living? The blacks (and their Jew allies) did it!

Jesse Helms would be proud. Now McCain needs to get down to Philadelphia , Mississippi and make a rip-roaring good speech, a la Ronald Reagan.

Patrick J. Buchanan Looks with Alarm at Declining 'White' Population

I like reading Patrick J. Buchanan. He's a great stylist, and unlike so many on the right, he's earnest and anti-interventionist in foreign policy.

On matters of race, though, Buchanan is whack.

In his latest column, The Way Our World Ends, Buchanan bemoans the future in which whites will compose an ever-decreasing proportion of the world's population, an alarming trend in Buchanan's view.

Writes Buchanan:

In 1950, whites were 28 percent of world population and Africans 9 percent, a ratio of three-to-one. In 2060, the ratio will remain the same. But the colors will be reversed. People of African ancestry will be 25 percent of the world's population. People of European descent will have fallen to 9.8 percent.

More arresting is that the white population is shrinking not only in
relative but in real terms. Two hundred million white people, one in every six on earth -- a number equal to the entire population of France, Britain, Holland and Germany -- will vanish by 2060.

The Caucasian race is going the way of the Mohicans.

And thinking locally, Buchanan notes:

And America? According to the Pew Research Center, the Hispanic population of the United States will triple to 127 million by 2050, as Mexico's population grows to 130 million. An erasure of the U.S. border, or merger of the two countries, or the linguistic, cultural and social annexation of the American Southwest by Mexico appears fated.

Facts elude the distraught Buchanan, fearfully betraying his status as a good Irishman.

Much of the American Southwest was stolen from Mexico in an American war of aggression in the mid-19th century.

Race is a sick illusion; it has no biological or anthropological meaning, other than that of a social-psychological pathology used prominently and tragically in American history, continuing today.

Buchanan does offer a nod to past Western genocide and aggression, noting:

Hopefully, the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, who are about to inherit the earth as we pass away, will treat us better than our ancestors treated them in the five centuries that Western Man ruled the world.

Buchanan would do better to note that constructs of race and dehumanization of those thought less than human are irrational and ludicrous.

We have nothing to fear from those with darker skin color, Mr. Buchanan, and your fear is unfounded.

"Don't worry, be happy," as Bobby McFerrin put it. And I think McFerrin may even be a black dude.

Obama Speech Draws Raves

Via PocketNines at Kos

Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial:
With his brilliant speech on race relations yesterday at the National Constitution Center, Barack Obama showed why his campaign for president has the aura of a mission.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Editorial:
As an example of contemporary oratory, it was stunning. As political rhetoric, it was designed to do far more than damage control and, in the end, distilled the essence of his candidacy.

New York Times Editorial:
We can’t know how effective Mr. Obama’s words will be with those who will not draw the distinctions between faith and politics that he drew, or who will reject his frank talk about race. What is evident, though, is that he not only cleared the air over a particular controversy — he raised the discussion to a higher plane.

Los Angeles Times Editorial:
No single speech will recalibrate America's consideration of race and politics, but we are closer today, thanks to this remarkable address, to facing our history and perfecting our nation.

Dallas Morning News Editorial:
Has any major U.S. politician in modern times ever given a speech about race in America as unflinching, human and ultimately hopeful as the one Barack Obama delivered yesterday? ...

It was possibly the most important major speech on race in America since Dr. King died, and it probably saved Mr. Obama's candidacy. If, in the end, Barack Obama does not win the nomination, let it never be said that he did not serve his country.

Chicago Sun-Times Editorial:
So Obama, in that exceptional way he has of brushing aside polemics, stepped up to a podium in Philadelphia and challenged us to see all the shades of gray, to embrace our greater and shared humanity.

It was a moving moment in American history to hear a man who could be president dissect the rancorous matter of race with such candor, and it called to mind other piercing addresses by the likes of FDR, Kennedy and King.

Sacramento Bee Editorial:
This was not a campaign speech; it was Barack Obama speaking to the ages. Clearly, he has thought about this issue for a very long time. Americans can learn from him, no matter what course the campaign may take.

Boston Globe Editorial:
... Obama took the opportunity to engage the question of race in America, starting a bold, uncomfortably honest conversation. He asked Americans to talk openly about the deep wells of anger and resentment over racism, discrimination, and affirmative action. It's a call to break out of the country's racial stalemate and finally reach a new national understanding.

Seattle Times Editorial:
In the annals of American history, a watershed moment should come from "A More Perfect Union," Sen. Barack Obama's powerful speech linking 221 years of race relations.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial:
On Tuesday morning, at a moment of maximum peril to his own ambitions, Sen. Barack Obama delivered not just a speech, but an extraordinary gift to America: A way to transcend racial divisions and political cynicism and set about the task of forming a more perfect union.

The 45-minute address, delivered to an audience of 200 elected officials and religious leaders at Philadelphia's Constitution Center, would have been remarkable under any circumstances. Under the circumstances that beset the senator from Illinois, it was the equivalent of a World Series walk-off grand-slam home run, a singular moment in the history of American political rhetoric.

Houston Chronicle Editorial:
Obama, confronted with flaws in his own church "family," passes these tests. His thoughtful exploration of those flaws certainly was good for his campaign. But by fully and realistically exploring and discussing the hard topic of race, Obama did more. He showed deep understanding of this complex culture, and faith in the strength of the national family.

Newsday Editorial:
The complex calculus of racial animus in this nation is real. And it is powerful. And, as Obama said, "to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races." This nation needs to bridge that chasm. One speech won't do it. Nor will one candidacy. But it would help if we stop using race as a political cudgel.

Newark Star-Ledger Editorial:
This was not a speech written by a political spinmeister just back from taking the pulse of the latest focus group. It was the heartfelt speech of a man who has spent a good part of his life thinking about what it means to be an American.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:
When we think of words in politics or governance that had to be said, we think of the Gettysburg Address or Franklin Delano Roosevelt's admonition that all we had to fear was "fear itself." And now we think of Obama's speech on race - words that sorely needed saying.

San Jose Mercury-News Editorial:
If Obama is, as we hope, the leader who can draw people across political divides to create real change and a renewed optimism in America, then confronting race head-on was inevitable. Perhaps Pastor Wright did us all a favor.

The Oregonian Editorial::
But every American, young and old, should hear this speech. Obama certainly isn't a post-racial candidate, if there is such a thing, and he didn't claim to be one Tuesday. But he did offer an inspiring vision of a nation where unity eclipses division, and where the identity we cherish most is the one we all share: American.

Des Moines Register Editorial:
His speech was frank and honest. And it offered hope that by confronting the racial resentments that continue to divide us, this nation can move forward toward becoming a more tolerant and understanding place.

Rochester Democrat and Chronicle Editorial:
Then again, Obama has already astounded conventional wisdom with the progress he's made in this year's presidential campaign. For the nation's sake, hope that America's conscience was at least pricked to want to do better.

Kansas City Star Editorial:
It would have been politically expedient for Obama to disown Wright totally. But in a reflection of his own integrity, Obama said Wright was instrumental in the development of his faith and had other virtues that his critics were ignoring.

Eugene Robinson, Washington Post:
Yesterday morning, in what may be remembered as a landmark speech regardless of who becomes the next president, Obama established new parameters for a dialogue on race in America that might actually lead somewhere -- that might break out of the sour stasis of grievance and countergrievance, of insensitivity and hypersensitivity, of mutual mistrust.

Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish:
I have never felt more convinced that this man's candidacy - not this man, his candidacy - and what he can bring us to achieve - is an historic opportunity. This was a testing; and he did not merely pass it by uttering safe bromides. He addressed the intimate, painful love he has for an imperfect and sometimes embittered man. And how that love enables him to see that man's faults and pain as well as his promise. This is what my faith is about. It is what the Gospels are about. This is a candidate who does not merely speak as a Christian. He acts like a Christian.

Courtland Milloy, Washington Post
Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), who co-chairs the Maryland for Obama campaign, hit the nail on the head when he told me: "Obama has the ability to elevate our thinking beyond the chicken-yard scratching and biting. He calls on us to soar like eagles. And if he can't always take you there, he can sure dare you to go."

David Corn, MotherJones.com:
With this address, Obama was trying to show the nation a pathway to a society free of racial gridlock and denial. Moreover, he declared that bridging the very real racial divide of today is essential to forging the popular coalition necessary to transform America into a society with a universal and effective health care system, an education system that serves poor and rich children, and an economy that yields a decent-paying jobs for all. Obama was not playing the race card. He was shooting the moon.

John Dickerson, Slate:
Can you give a State of the Union address before you're president? Barack Obama talked about race in America for 45 minutes in a nearly 5,000-word speech. That was longer than some of the annual presidential addresses, and though, yes, those speeches tend to cover more topics, this one felt like it addressed the actual state of our union more than those dreary January list readings presidents are obligated to perform.

Janny Scott, New York Times:
Yet the speech was also hopeful, patriotic, quintessentially American — delivered against a blue backdrop and a phalanx of stars and stripes. Mr. Obama invoked the fundamental values of equality of opportunity, fairness, social justice. He confronted race head-on, then reached beyond it to talk sympathetically about the experiences of the white working class and the plight of workers stripped of jobs and pensions.

Jonathan Alter, Newsweek:
In introducing the speech, Harris Wofford, the former senator from Pennsylvania, hinted at the historic weight that hung over the occasion. Wofford, a friend of Martin Luther King Jr.'s and a onetime adviser to President John F. Kennedy, recalled a White House conversation with King, after Kennedy had informed King that there would be no quick vote on the sweeping civil rights legislation pending. "Martin turned to me and said, 'I had hoped we at long last had a president who had the intelligence to understand this problem and the political skill to solve it and the moral passion to see it through. I'm convinced ... that he has got the intelligence and the skill. We'll have to see if he has the passion'."
Wofford suggested that Obama did in fact possess all three qualities. The critics, reporters, cable commentators—and ultimately the voters—will all be weighing that assertion in the aftermath of the most personal and extensive discussion of the legacy of slavery made by any major American politician in memory. For the moment, Obama gave them much more to talk about than the sermons of Jeremiah Wright.

Jim Mitchell, Dallas Morning News:
Politicians rarely achieve such a depth of humanity, in part because they're captive to narrow life experiences, rigid ideology or consultants. It's one thing to know intellectually that race is still a factor in American life and how it polls. It's quite another to eloquently express the profound stain of past racial injustices without being trite, hostile or unabashedly partisan.

Jon Robin Baitz, Huffington Post:
Today we saw and heard a preview of our brightest possible American future in Senator Barack Obama's glorious speech. This, then, is what it means to be presidential. To be moral. To have a real center. To speak honestly, from the heart, for the benefit of all. If there was any doubt about what we have missed in the anti-intellectual, ruthlessly incurious Bush years, and even the slippery Clinton ones (the years of "what is is"), those doubts were laid to rest by Barack Obama's magisterial speech today. A speech in which he distanced himself from a flawed father figure, Reverend Wright, and did so with almost Shakespearian dignity and honor.