You know, the one about how we have to "get over it" on race and join with Senator Obama in creating "a more perfect union?"

It was supposed to do more - end the smearing of the Senator's campaign by affiliating him with the extreme remarks of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the pastor at the senator's Chicago-based Trinity United Church of Christ.

The speech has been hailed as beautiful and well written, direct and truthful, honest and heartfelt. But Senator Obama ultimately just wants you to leave his pastor out of this, according to the AP yesterday:

....Reflecting the campaign's concern about the fallout, Obama used a question about religion at a town hall forum as an opportunity to address the issue. 

"This is somebody that was preaching three sermons at least a week for 30 years and it got boiled down ... into a half-minute sound clip and just played it over and over and over again, partly because it spoke to some of the racial divisions we have in this country," Obama told an audience in this central North Carolina city.

"There are misunderstandings on both sides," the Illinois senator said. "We cannot solve the problems of America if every time somebody somewhere does something stupid, that everybody gets up in arms and forgets about the war in Iraq and we forget about the economy."

Ultimately, that's quite a bit less soaring and inspirational than the themes addressed in the Philadelphia speech. It's not the idea of, "continu[ing] the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America." It's not the impressive declaration that, "I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas." And it's not as fiercely protective as the statement, "I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother."

In fact, it's a retreat. Senator Obama realizes that while there is a cluster of progressive-minded voters weirded out by Wright's statements who are looking for a palliative, the average voter isn't going to see things that way. The speech is addressed to everyone, but appeals mostly to people of conscience, those who are lovers of nuance. The people who are most outraged by Rev. Wright's speeches love neither nuance nor complexity. Blunt instruments appeal to them.

Ultimately, while Obama's speech was beautiful, it will have as much short-term affect as Mitt Romney's December 2007 address on why Republican voters should accept his Mormonism. At the time, he declared, "Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree." And the voters he was speaking to voted in droves for Governor Mike Huckabee.

Governor Romney's speech failed because he appealed to intolerant people to be tolerant of his religious difference. Senator Obama's address has a similar intended function, when he says that the "white community" must acknowledge, "that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people." He's right, of course, they should acknowledge that the legacy of slavery is real. But the most intolerant voters, those who are most tired of what they see as a welfare state that favors black people disporportionately, they just don't care. And they see Rev. Wright as the sneering voice that can't appreciate how much America has done for black people, however much that notion is exaggerated in their minds.

Perhaps Senator realizes his speech might have been pearls thrown to swine, and that's why he complains about boiling his pastor down into an outrageous 30-second soundbite. But complaining that people misperceive his pastor isn't going to get him out of the hot water he's in, either. And while he's working to make a "more perfect union," it's unlikely he'll be able to make this issue go away so he can create a "more perfect campaign."