I am inclining towards "Dean Scream" in regards to Obama's race speech.  Praised (and in many cases stridently overpraised) for stating the obvious (blacks are angry, whites don't care), it may have given Obama a little too much gravitas for his own good.  He is already easily the most humorless messiah since Quetzalcoatl. 

It turns out the speech was far too nuanced for a politician on the national stage, in a tight race for a nomination, to whom we look for soundbites, not sutras.  However vaunted the themes, however eloquent their elucidation, the focus of commentators, bloggers, and comments-trolls came to rest on whether he had slagged off his racist white granny for, as one conjecturer in the Times (the astoundingly loquacious John McWhorter) ventured, using "the 'N' word" — hastening to add, "I don't know that that's what it was..."

(Obama actually said, of his grandmother: "I can no more disown [Rev. Wright] 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.")

This is the line that seemed to resonate with conservative commentators, and white working class voters in Pennsylvania, whose primary is coming up.  "Why did he throw his own grandmother under the bus?" was the question Ann Coulter asked the next day, and it echoed through the blogosphere like the screech of a hell-bat in Crystal Cave.  Want a peek at the Republican playbook for the general election?  Coulter's got your talking points covered.

Obama's comments a couple days later calling his grandmother "a typical white person" added a couple more to the list.  On radio 610 WIP in Philly Thursday he tried to clarify what he had said on Tuesday: "the point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, well there's a reaction that's in our experiences that won't go away and can sometimes come out in the wrong way. And that's just the nature of race in our society. We have to break through it."

Friday he was busy clarifying what he had said on Thursday: "What I was trying to express is something I expressed in the speech, which is that we all harbor stereotypes. That doesn’t make us bad people. It’s simply pointing out that – and by the way, the context in which I stated that is the fear of young black men on the streets. That’s not even unique to white people. African-Americans have incorporated those stereotypes."

Words, words, words!

This is what nuance buys you in an election year, babe.  Was it naive for Obama to assume that his words would be taken as intended?  Does the Pope shit in the woods?

Reaction among the resentful classes has been, well, resentful.  (Lesson No.1: Calling resentful people "resentful" only makes them more resentful.  Go figure.)  One bar-fly at a blue collar dive in Philly had this message for Obama: "I don't want to hear that you are blaming us." 

As one reporter put it: "Mr. Obama's message has not reached its target."

And while it's very touching that Obama wrote the speech all by himself, as FOBOs in the press corps stressed ("You could tell it was personal, that he had worked hard on it, all weekend and into the wee hours Tuesday," Maureen Dowd gushed) he would have done well to market test the granny under the bus bit.

The truth is, even if you took the time to read the speech (I have several times since it was published), or watch it on youtube (and a couple million people have since it first aired) you have to admit it is pretty densely nuanced.  Which is to say, suspicious-sounding to the "untrained ear," to borrow a phrase from it. 

When the papers praised it, it was like the praise of cineastes for a well-crafted, high-minded foreign film.  You're not supposed to enjoy it, but you've got to see it.  (sorry, no subtitles.)  Reverend Wright's sermons, on the other hand, are like Madea's Family Reunion. Lowbrow blockbustas.

Meanwhile, Clinton's remained mum, as well she should.  She chose this week to release her White House records, which showed she was not really her husband's co-President after all.  The Obama campaign tried to bash her on experience, but their told-you-so's fell on deaf ears.  Then the Obama campaign circulated a photo of Bill Clinton with Reverend Wright.  Seemed kinda desperate.  Nobody cared.  Obama got his passport spied on by the State Department.  Big yawn.  So did everybody else. 

Seems a can of worms has been opened.  A can of eloquent worms, but worms nonetheless.  Sometimes it's better to just scream.