redblueamerica.com

Barack Obama is scheduled to deliver a major speech Tuesday on race, America and his campaign in the wake of the uproar over Rev. Jeremiah Wright's incendiary sermonizing. I'll be keenly interested in what Obama has to say. Obama's explanations so far have been less than persuasive. But then again, I've never been a fan.

As I argued earlier, the problem with Obama's erstwhile spiritual advisor isn't his peculiar theology but his politics. Obama has struggled mightily over the past few days to distinguish his view of the world from Wright's. Despite his and his supporters' best efforts to create distance, Obama's uplifting campaign of hope and change is tainted by "God damn America."

But Wright's theology shouldn't be dismissed or overlooked, either. The Asia Times' pseudonymous columnist Spengler provides a fascinating primer on the black liberation theology of Wright. Spengler concludes:

Obama holds his own views close. But it seems unlikely that he would identify with the ideological fits of the black-power movement of the 1960s. Obama does not come to the matter with the perspective of an American black, but of the child of a left-wing anthropologist raised in the Third World... It is possible that because of the Wright affair Obama will suffer for what he pretended to be, rather than for what he really is.

Obama will be hard pressed Tuesday to make his closely held views plain to Americans, regardless of race and yet acutely aware of it. He is truly a bound man.

Update: Shelby Steele, author of A Bound Man, has a trenchant piece in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal. The gist: "No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself." More on this tomorrow, I think.