You can't handle the truth

Obama gave a speech on race from the heart. It was honest and frank. It was fair-minded and clear-eyed and filled with exactly the reason, understanding, and sympathy that America needs in its leaders. Above all, it was authentic.

There is no Republican in public life who could deliver such a speech, much less write it himself, as Obama did. There are precious few other Democrats, if any. Even Bill Clinton couldn't do it.

Yet, instead of judging the speech on its own considerable merit, Katharine Seelye of course judges it on the basis of how others are spinning it. This is par for the course for Seelye, who always spins to the detriment of Democrats. Here she's spinning for Hillary, but, come the general, that won't last.

Seelye poses as wanting to know whether the speech was effective in the white working class, or whether, in a formula she adopts straight from Rush Limbaugh, 'whether the speech cements Mr. Obama as the “black candidate” in the minds of blue-collar whites'. What she appears to want, really, is simply to put out the narrative that these voters won't accept Obama, that it wasn't "effective".

Seelye quotes a bunch of Democrats who supposedly have working class cred (even though several are academics), and only one of them has a concrete criticism - and that's that the speech didn't contain enough policy. Shit, not enough policy! What will we do? We'll have to listen to everyone else's dry policy dissertations to see how it really ought to be done.