Obama's Speech (UPDATED)

Barack Obama is addressing the Wright controversy as I type this.

I have some things to take care of, but anyone who wants to comment on the speech, please do so here.

PRELIMINARY JUDGMENT: Well done, especially the part about his maternal grandmother. (The liberal bromides contained in the speech are less important and are to be expected.) More later.

UPDATE: From Drudge, the transcript.

UPDATE:
Allahpundit:

Now, with his ass in a sling, suddenly it’s time for the great conversation [on race]. If any other politician tried a move this transparently cynical, to nudge the conversation away from his own craven tolerance of racial hatred to some sort of redemption narrative by which to hold that against him is to be, in effect, objectively anti-progress, the media would vivisect him.

More from Shelby Steele regarding the Bargainer's Mask:

For whites, here is the opportunity to document their deliverance from the shames of their forbearers. And for blacks, here is the chance to document the end of inferiority. So the Clintons have found themselves running more against America's very highest possibilities than against a man.

Kyle-Anne Shiver at American Thinker:

Barack Obama maintains that even though his pastor and his wife have no pride in America, he himself has remained above all that division and strife, incredulously, because he never even knew about it. [SNIP]

I don't know about you, dear reader, but I'm getting a bit queasy at the thought of Barack Obama's tendency to know nothing about nothing when it comes to people and problems right under his nose. If he genuinely was not on to the racism of his own pastor, the guy who was like an "uncle" to him, how will he be able to see through the lying hypocrisy of IslamoFascists[?]

Chris Durang at Huffington Post:

I'm sorry -- I don't often get moved and inspired listening to a speaker. I think Barack Obama is brilliant, and he is a genuine healer. If we don't take our chances with him, we are doomed to more of this endless, idiot, non-constructive bickering deadlock that passes for governance in our stuck, stalled political landscape.

Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom:

It’s a movingly schmaltzy piece. It may do the trick for him.

Ann Althouse:

I'd say he did not do very much — other than to resist condemning Wright and to model his socially acceptable attitudes and generate a feeling — I'm sure you didn't all feel it — that we need unite behind this man if the terrible divisions over race are going to end.

UPDATE: And from my other political father:

The fact that Obama talks differently than Jeremiah Wright does not mean that his track record is different. Barack Obama’s voting record in the Senate is perfectly consistent with the far-left ideology and the grievance culture, just as his wife’s statement that she was never proud of her country before is consistent with that ideology. [SNIP]

Equality means that a black demagogue who has been exposed as a phony deserves exactly the same treatment as a white demagogue who has been exposed as a phony.