Sister Souljah had a Hillary moment.

She's talking about a number of things to Time, but when she's asked what she thinks about Hillary Clinton, she "pauses" and "then pulls out an unsealed envelope":

“I want to control what I say so that I can be quoted properly. I have this past history of being misquoted or misunderstood.” She slides an index card across the table. It reads, “She reminds me too much of the slave plantation white wife of the white ‘Master.’ She talks down to people, is condescending and pandering. She even talked down to the Commander in Chief, President Barack Obama, while she was under his command!”

Souljah also offers her own definition of the term that bears her name:

“People say, ‘What is a Sister Souljah moment?’ And I say, ‘That’s when you meet a beautiful, powerful woman—and you just can’t forget her.’”

"No Disrespect."

"The hole in your heart when you don’t have a male figure in the home who can guide you and lead you."

Barack Obama, speaking from personal experience... and deviating from politically correct feminism.

Mr. Obama cited the need for stronger law enforcement services and resources for education, more job opportunities and other resources for communities.

“But we also need families to raise our children,” he said. “We need fathers to realize that responsibility doesn’t just end at conception. That doesn’t just make you a father. What makes you a man is not the ability to have a child. Any fool can have a child. That doesn’t make you a father. It’s the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.”

There are a lot of women raising children alone — or with another woman — who don't like to think that their children are missing some special "guide" or "leader" because there is no male parent figure. This is not to say that such women don't see the value of a good father, only that they find something offensive in saying that the "male figure" in particular is needed. And Obama is saying that it is so important that it left a hole in his heart:

“I know the toll it took on me, not having a father in the house,” he continued. “The hole in your heart when you don’t have a male figure in the home who can guide you and lead you. So I resolved many years ago that it was my obligation to break the cycle — that that if I could be anything in life, I would be a good father to my children."

Now, I know what he is trying to do is to push more men to be involved in their children's lives, but the way he is saying it, he is siding with traditionalists who think the male role is special, distinctive, and necessary.

ADDED: Matt Yglesias strains this out:

This one will, I expect, be a pretty big hit politically, too, since it has certain conservativish resonances about the centrality of family conditions to our social problems.

Pussyfooting is so loud. You'll have to click on the link to figure out whether Matt agrees with the NYT that Obama was talking about black men.

IN THE COMMENTS:

Holdfast said:

Obviously his mom did a pretty decent job raising him...

I said:

Actually, he spent a lot of the time with his grandparents, and his grandfather was the father figure. Maybe he should read Clarence Thomas's memoir ("My Grandfather's Son").

Thomas, like Obama, spent much of his youth living with his married grandparents. Thomas lavishes credit on his grandfather. Perhaps Obama would say that Thomas does have a hole in his heart.

Zachary Paul Sire said:

Obama is just pandering and doing what he's "supposed" to be doing...same thing goes for him helping fill sandbags in Iowa.

Palladian said:

So you're admitting that he's a phony liar? That he doesn't actually believe what he's saying? That he's just lying to the "heartland" in order to get elected and implement his anemic socialism?

If this is true, then where's this "change" we've heard so much about? Or is that, as many of us suspect, just another empty political lie? If he's willing to lie and pander to the "heartland" about the need for fathers then what makes you assume that he isn't lying about all that "hope" and "change" nonsense in order to pander to urban liberals?

William said:

Wow, yesterday Obama came out in favor of bike helmets and today we note that he is in favor of fatherhood. He certainly is not afraid to take a forthright stand on the tough issues....We are all pocked with emptiness. It is what we use to fill up those empty spaces that defines us. I wonder if the Rev Wright wasn't in some way a father figure. If the abandonment by his father was the central trauma of his life, then Obama has re-enacted that trauma with the Rev Wright. And perhaps he will find some other blowhard to re-enact it with again. I think O'Neill, no stranger to childhood trauma, observed that the past is never really past. We keep revisiting the same pain, hoping to make it turn out right. And it never does.

Unfairly psychoanalytical? Obama's text invites it.

Lou Minatti said:

Ya'll do realize this was Obama's Sister Souljah speech, right? The speech wasn't aimed at men who abandon their families, it was aimed at white middle-of-the-roaders, aka Reagan Democrats.

Amba said:

It's not so much that men and women have different roles. Their roles are much more alike now than they used to be. It's not what they do but what they are: how they sound, how they feel, how they smell. A sense of protection and authority emanates from a man because his voice is deep and his body is solid. This is very primal. It's like the sun and the moon.

This reminds me of a conversation I had recently about whether, in an egalitarian heterosexual relationship, the man should protect the woman and whether she should want the feeling of being protected.

AJ Lynch said:

Is it hard to write a book in tribute to your father after he has left a hole in your heart?

FYI - Senator Obama is a phony.

I think Obama knows he failed his mother by concentrating on his father the way he did, but, to be fair, the book is not so much a "tribute" to his father as it is a search for what he missed and an expression of regret for loss. As he said in the speech at the church yesterday, he made that longing for a father central to his own life as he became the good father he did not have.

ADDED: Donald Douglas says he was "surprised" that I "ridiculed Obama's speech from a feminist perspective." Where did I ridicule him? My point is that he disrespected a point of feminist dogma. I didn't take a position on the correctness of the dogma. I just want everyone to see that he crossed feminism here. I want that noticed. He threw a bone to traditionalists, and you were so into gnawing it that you didn't notice that I was not talking about whether children need fathers.

"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."

Barack Obama gives his big speech in response to the uproar over Jeremiah Wright. Brief excerpts:

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy....

... 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...

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....

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man....

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me...

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...

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up....

Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. [T]he anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

Missing here, I think, is an explicit acknowledgment that Wright is not merely expressing the anger he feels but that he is leading people into anger, keeping anger fresh and alive.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

Again, Obama speaks as if Wright were only expressing his beliefs, and he does not say that Wright was, from his powerful leadership position, instilling these beliefs in many others.

But the key question isn't whether Obama puts Wright down strongly enough. It's what Obama himself is. Would he, as a leader in the most powerful position, instill this destructive thinking in others? That doesn't at all seem to be what he does, and the rest of the speech is largely a demonstration that he does not:

I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

He ends the speech with a saccharine anecdote about a decidedly un-angry old black man who tells a young white woman — Ashley — that he's supporting Obama "because of Ashley." Mustard sandwiches were involved. Did that distract you from what he did and didn't do in the speech?

I'd say he did not do very much — other than to resist condemning Wright and to model his socially acceptable attitudes and generate a feeling — I'm sure you didn't all feel it — that we need unite behind this man if the terrible divisions over race are going to end.

ADDED: Andrew Sullivan felt it: "I have never felt more convinced that this man's candidacy - not this man, his candidacy - and what he can bring us to achieve - is an historic opportunity. This was a testing; and he did not merely pass it by uttering safe bromides." And it felt all Christian to him.

Jonathan Chait thinks it worked, but only because Obama is black:

My first reaction is that the speech was extremely smart and intellectually subtle....

He may be liberated to operate at a high intellectual level in public because he's black. I'm not trying to be Gerry Ferraro here; let me explain. Candidates like John Kerry and (even moreso) Al Gore were also very smart, but constantly forced to dumb it down lest they be tagged as out-of-touch elitists. Since the egghead image is so at odds with the prevailing stereotypes about African-Americans, he has much less to fear by speaking at a high intellectual level.

Oh, bullshit. You may not be trying to be Gerry Ferraro here, but the only nonsexual difference between you and Geraldine is that you're for Obama and she's on the other side. And here's a clue: John Kerry is not very smart.

Righty Paul Mirengoff delivers a left-handed compliment:

Although Obama's speech is not without its evasions, I consider it a courageous one by usual political standards. He has refused to walk away from Wright's black liberation theology when it might well have been expedient to do so. The rest of us now should have the courage to take Obama at his word and decide whether it is acceptable to elect as president of the United States someone who carries Rev. Wright around as part of him, and who takes his ranting seriously.

Kathryn Jean Lopez does a pithy paraphrase:

Damn straight, Rev. Wright is angry. That's how I wound up at his church. That's why I stay there. I'm mad too, I just control it better. Now let's get electing me president so we can all feel good.

Of course, that's completely unfair. Even if he can be understood to have said something along the lines of "I'm mad too," he distinguished himself from Wright not in hiding his anger, but in believing we can change the things that cause the anger.

AND: Don't miss Shelby Steele's column in the WSJ (written before today's speech, but on point):

How does one "transcend" race in this church?...

What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn't this hatred more rhetorical than real?...

No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself.

Here's what Steele means by "bargaining":

Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.

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ADDED: Michael Weiss at Slate quotes this from me: "I'd say he did not do very much — other than to resist condemning Wright and to model his socially acceptable attitudes and generate a feeling — I'm sure you didn't all feel it — that we need unite behind this man if the terrible divisions over race are going to end." Weiss interprets this to mean that I saw the speech as a failure. But that's not right. I know I wrote "he did not do very much," but that doesn't mean it was a mistake not to do very much. Obama did not condemn Jeremiah Wright. He did not reach for a "Sister Souljah moment." He didn't present himself in a new light. But, in a way — within a narrow band — he did a lot, perhaps too much. It was all very subtle. He tried to be entirely inclusive, reaching out to everyone, and stepping on nobody's toes. He insisted both that we confront race and also that we get past it. There were complex contradictions in what he said, but his smoothly honed language made it possible for us to ignore these difficulties even as we could credit him with taking on an elaborately sophisticated problem. I think he meant to deal with his predicament this way. There's no reason to call that a failure.

AND: Mickey Kaus does a terrific job of identifying many of the contradictions you weren't supposed to notice.

"Shame on you," says Bill Clinton, if you're worried the Hillary campaign is exploiting race.

So it's all in your head if you think the Clintons are doing anything to use race to beat Barack Obama.

Here's Dick Morris taking the strong position that they absolutely know what they are doing and mean to do it:

If Hillary loses South Carolina and the defeat serves to demonstrate Obama's ability to attract a bloc vote among black Democrats, the message will go out loud and clear to white voters that this is a racial fight. It's one thing for polls to show, as they now do, that Obama beats Hillary among African-Americans by better than 4-to-1 and Hillary carries whites by almost 2-to-1. But most people don't read the fine print on the polls. But if blacks deliver South Carolina to Obama, everybody will know that they are bloc-voting. That will trigger a massive white backlash against Obama and will drive white voters to Hillary Clinton.

Obama has done everything he possibly could to keep race out of this election. And the Clintons attracted national scorn when they tried to bring it back in by attempting to minimize the role Martin Luther King Jr. played in the civil rights movement. But here they have a way of appearing to seek the black vote, losing it, and getting their white backlash, all without any fingerprints showing. The more President Clinton begs black voters to back his wife, and the more they spurn her, the more the election becomes about race -- and Obama ultimately loses

Here's Mickey Kaus proposing what he thinks is a clever tactic:

He could try to make Hillary the pet candidate of Latinos the way he's being cast as the pet candidate of blacks--but that would require a shift to the right on immigrant legalization that he doesn't seem willing to make.)...

The more obvious move is to find a Sister Souljah--after Saturday--to stiff arm. The most promising candidate is not a person, but an idea: race-based affirmative action. Obama has already made noises about shifting to a class-based, race-blind system of preferences. What if he made that explicit? Wouldn't that shock hostile white voters into taking a second look at his candidacy? He'd renew his image as trans-race leader (and healer). The howls of criticism from the conventional civil-rights establishment--they'd flood the cable shows--would provide him with an army of Souljahs to hold off. If anyone noticed Hillary in the ensuing fuss, it would be to put her on the spot--she'd be the one defending mend-it-don't-end-it civil rights orthodoxy.

Centralize affirmative action as an issue in the campaign? How would that play out? It seems to me that the candidates would like to get race back into the background — but Hillary first must use it to defeat Obama.

IN THE COMMENTS: Our ghostly reader from the distant past, Sir Archy, has favored us with another visit!

To Professor Althouse.

Madam,

As a Ghost of a former Scotch Elector, dead these 250 years and more, I have seen many an Election, and voted in not a Few. My unfortunate Death put an end to my climbing the Polling Booth steps, as the Franchise was not extended in Scotland in my Day to the Dead. That my Ghostly Condition entitles me to especial Consideration in certain American Constituencies is a piece of welcome Intelligence; I shall endeavor to inform your Readers of the Progress of my Efforts to claim my Place, after these many Years, as an American Elector.

But enough of my Fortunes—let us think on those of Mrs. Clinton: That Mrs. Clinton will be elect'd President, can admit of no Doubt. Consider the Clintons' Past-Mast'ry of arousing Passion & exciting Fear. Consider Mrs. Clinton's prospective Opponents: A Gentleman of good Fortune & Family, but insipid and uninspiring Mien; a half-pay Officer gone into Politicks, who, despite his heroick Past, has anger'd Half his Party; and a former Lord Mayor, who would play Dick Whittington, had he either the Sagacity of the Original, or the Cat of the Character. Are any of these Gentlemen a serious Obstacle to the Clinton Ferocity?

Consider her principal Opponent within her own Party: He should be the only Force that could halt Mrs. Clinton's inexorable Advance upon the White House. He is a fine and accomplish'd Gentleman of African descent, yet his Armour provides the Clintons two Chinks into which to insert the Rapier: The First is that he is a fine Gentleman, and not used to such vengeful Blows; the Second is that he is African, which in America opens him to a variety of Trips beyond the Dreams of any Stiletto-wielding Assassin. The Clintons have him down and are now engag'd in trying the Joints of his Breastplate. We only await Blood upon the Ground as Confirmation of his Demise.

That Mrs. Clinton should be elect'd President ought to occasion sombre Reflection among the American Electorate. The Maxims of a Democratick Nation imply the continual Rotation of Power, and that a Man (or now, a Woman) may answer Ambition with Effort, and rise by way of Politicks. That Power be always the Provinance of one Family or the Other, is a Situation fitter to Spain in my Day, where Hapsburgs & Bourbons contended to oppress an Empire, rather than for a manly Nation, founded on the Principles of British Liberty.

Giving careful consideration to the Qualities of the various Candidates for whom I should vote,

I remain, Madam,

Your humble & obt. Servant,

Sir Archy