Barack Obama came to give a speech about race and his wacky Pastor, he kicked that speech’s ass, and in doing so irrevocably solidified his place in my heart.

If you haven’t heard it you can read and or watch it here

Now in and of itself the speech was not genius. It was not uber-profound or a display of remarkable intelligence, execution, or depth. It rocked, it kicked ass, and it was one of the greatest political speeches of my lifetime. It’s his words presence in such a desolate political landscape that year after year, election after election is a barren waste of empty words, condescending rhetoric, and demogoguery, that Obama seems like Abraham Lincoln talking about the better angels of our nature.

Obama was indeed eloquent and profound, but those qualities are so much more magnified due to never hearing politicians get up there and speak to us like we’re adults that can handle being talked to like complex individuals that can hold a myriad of ideas and thoughts about our world in our minds at one time.

The grandmother piece was brilliant. We all have some friends and or relatives who say or do embarrassing things at times. We don’t disown them. This put the Pastor thing into perspective. I don’t even necessarily disagree with all the pastor’s words. I don’t think much of him just because he’s a pastor. Therefore he’s a hypocrite. he’s railing about America and it’s repression of black people and he’s part of a religion that has always been used as a tool to aid in that repression. But putting that into a context everyone can relate to was a great.

And as I said, the whole thing was really great, it’s just not anything I or many people I know couldn’t have written. It sounded like something produced by a smart person who doesn’t care about political biases. Which gets at a quality I was attracted to in Obama from early on in this thing. Sure there was some hedging in there but I think it was coming from a legitimate and honest place. I don’t see throwing his silly Pastor under a bus as honest. That would have been political opportunism. This was far more brave and honest. Just as choosing black over white or vice versa as he talked about some of the latent anger in our country would have been myopic.

And it took some serious guts to get into that whole segment about black people in their barber shops or around the kitchen table letting off some of the steam and saying some of the things they don’t say around us whites at work. This plays on a lot of white America’s latent fears about the black community as some kind of large gang secretly hating all of us waiting for a chance to strike. But he took a chance that people will see this for what it was. An honest accounting of the private lives we all have and the private selves we hold back from public consumption because some part of us knows it’s either stupid or irrational.

And his refusal to take any particular side in the racial divide, or to at least paint a fuller picture even as he speaks more from the black vantage point, gets at something else he said. He talked about how we can continue to mire the process in the same old nastiness and divisions and speculate that white men will only vote for McCain, women with Hillary, and black’s with him. But these are, or at least should be, notions that are beneath intelligent and evolved beings.

Yesterday for one of the first times I can remember a politician running for a major office took for granted that there may be enough of those intelligent, evolved beings out there.

May his and his silly pastor’s Zombie Jesus have mercy on his soul because I’m afraid there just aren’t.