RACE AND BEYOND

Barack Obama was at his eloquent best in his speech about race. After hesitating for several days, he faced squarely the controversial remarks by his former pastor denouncing the United States as racist, murderous and corrupt. Everyone already knew that race was an issue in the presidential campaign, but hardly anyone was saying so.

Then came the firestorm over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his black-power pronouncements about white-run America. Sen. Obama managed to distance himself from the worst of Mr. Wright’s hate speech while explaining the resentment as the sort of thing normally expressed privately in the barbershop or around the kitchen table.

Rather than trying to defend and excuse himself for sitting through some of the Rev. Wright’s pulpit diatribes, Sen. Obama has put race right in the middle of the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination, in language comparable to that of the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal in his 1944 study of race relations, “An American Dilemma: The Negro problem and Modern Democracy.”

As skillfully as Sen. Obama dealt with the racial issue, he seems to have implied that it is the only issue in his contest with Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. He seemed to be saying that unless he won, all other issues would fail. As he put it, “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 our children and our grandchildren.”

Referring to “the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through,” he said: “If we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.”

But whether he wins or loses, the issues of health care, education and good jobs will persist. And among the facts of life is the certainty that any election produces losers as well as winners. It would be a great pity if Sen. Obama’s many inspired followers, blacks and whites, would give up on politics if he should be defeated. He has deftly put the race issue into the campaign, but race is not the only issue.

One way or another, either Sen. Obama or Sen. Clinton will win the Democratic nomination. The winner there will go up against Sen. John McCain (with Ralph Nader as an expected perennial distraction). And whoever becomes president, we will still face issues of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, health care, the economy – and, of course, race.