Jon, it'll be nice if Obama's speech can de-racialize the discourse of the campaign. But he certainly didn't take the most direct way to that end, which would have been to argue for minimizing the significance of the "racial tiffs," that they represent the views of minorities and are unrelated to what his broader campaign is about, etc. He didn't do that. He deepened their significance, making both Ferraro and Wright stand-ins for big communities within the American body politic. 

Here's what struck me as the key passage of Obama's speech, related to the passage he cited:

This is where we are right now.  It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years.  Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people - that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union. 

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past.  It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life.  But it also means binding our particular grievances - for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. [emph. added]

Key because it suggests the beginnings of a way to get past the "racial stalemate" beyond just ceasing to talk about it--beyond just ceasing to, as Obama put it, "play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day," which is a good idea but which won't do that much to assuage the kind of long-simmering racial resentments he discussed in the bulk of the speech. We could, though, all do better at binding our grievances to those of others. The line was a wonderful allusion to Lincoln, too--he who called on us, in his second inaugural, to "bind up the nation's wounds." We never fully did what Lincoln asked.

I do think Obama defined his candidacy more in terms of race today, but I guess from my perspective that's a good thing. His calls for "change" always left me a little cold: change what? After hearing his speech, the "what?" feels clearer.

--Eve Fairbanks