Scott Horton writes a wonderful column/blog for Harpers called No Comment. Unfortunately the RSS feed for this blog is terrible (only headlines, no content), so I often miss what he has to say. But today he had an entry called “The Speech” and I was lucky to catch it:
[…] as the speech unfolded, I realized that it was nothing like what I had expected. I stopped my work and started to focus on it. The voice was level, unagitated but still intensely personal. The speaker tackled issues that by common wisdom could never help his political cause; that could only damage him. He spoke the unspoken truths about racial divide in America, and he spoke with a strong sense of wrongs, yet with no anger, and a clear vision of justice. The vision he presented was more than simply compelling in a political sense. It rang of dangerous truth.
[…]
This speech puts Obama on a level above his critics, and it is something that will speak over time and that should be heard over the vacuous chatter of the political punditry. It is something sublime.
If you still have not listened to the speech, do so now. Really.