"A More Perfect Union"

Large snippets of Barack Obama's speech, with some commentary from yours truly...

On race:

I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we are truly one.

This entire section, the last sentence in particular, is one of the most patriotic statements I have ever heard. What most of white America tends to forget is that we're all immigrants; that, despite our "whiteness," we come from other lands in far away places. Italian, Polish, British, and yes, even French..."American" isn't a race in and of itself but rather, by design, a combination of different races. Barack Obama is a picture-perfect example of the true "American."

On Jeremiah Wright:

...Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems - two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask?

...But the truth is, that isn't all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth...

...As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children...He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Puts a lump in your throat, doesn't it!? Obama refused to throw under a bus the man who has been a father-figure to him for decades. Talk about class. This man has it in spades.

On this election:

We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

An Iraq War that is entering its sixth year, a housing market in ruins, an economy that is about to take a depression-esque downturn, an executive branch that is functioning as if a dictatorship, al-Quaida regrouping in Afghanistan, America's global stature in ruins...

Hillary Clinton's strategy at this point seems to be to sully Barack Obama for the general election. She knows she can't win this nomination, so why not do everything she can to make Obama look as bad as possible, let McCain win the presidency, and then come back in 2012 and make another run at this thing?

I'll tell you why, Sen. Clinton. I don't think America could survive four more years of Republican rule. It's that plain and that simple. And if you were a true patriot, if you were a true American, you would stop making this about you and instead make it about us.

After eight years of it, a greed and hunger for power for power's sake is the last thing this country needs as we head into the second decade of the 21st century. And right now, at this point in the cycle, that hunger for power is the only explanation for your candidacy.

Sen. Clinton: It is well past time for you to do what any other candidate would have done after losing 12 consecutive contests in the month of February, and for whom the remaining math just doesn't add up. It is time for you to step aside. For the sake of the party unity to which you pay lip service, for the sake of our great country, please - stand down.

For, as he proved beyond a reasonable doubt yesterday, the United States of America needs Barack Obama as its next president. We simply cannot afford the alternatives.