To begin with, Barack Obama fumbled the ball when controversial tapes of his long time Pastor Reverend Wright were first sprung on national TV. His initial reply, emphasizing that he previously knew nothing about Wright's most provocative comments because he wasn't actually sitting in a church pew when those sermons were given, was technically true at best. It was also a deflection from the real issues being aired, and an irresistible invitation to the nation's media to prove him wrong, reminiscent of Gary Hart when he foolishly dared the media to prove he was having an extra marital affair while he ran for President.

There was no excuse for Barack Obama not better preparing for this moment. Knowing how Willie Horton was used as a dagger to the heart of Mike Dukakis' Presidential campaign, surely Barack Obama knew sermons containing Reverend Wright's racially explicit preaching, shown in videos his church openly sold to the world, would be mined for damaging politically content by those who bear Obama no good will. An aid to McCain's campaign has already been ousted for stitching together inflammatory snippets of Wright's most controversial preaching for a planned hit on Obama. It was all quite predictable.

It's unlikely Barack Obama would have fumbled his first response to the Wright tapes release had he consciously chosen to get out ahead of the issue to begin with, by preemptively fully dealing with his two decade long relationship with Pastor Wright before he was forced into crisis response mode. He didn't though. Why not? The answer I believe lies in an early tactical decision made by Obama's campaign to position him as a post racial candidate for the primaries.

But that decision clashed with the core insight of the speech on race Barack Obama just gave. We are not living in a post racial America, nor do we live in the segregationist past. That is the heart of the speech Barack Obama delivered. It explains many of the awkward moments we all on occasion witness, and the seemingly contradictory thoughts and actions of essentially good people navigating complex social changes. Obama explained it well. Neither fish nor fowl, not racist nor post racial; we are a society in the midst of a positive transition, overall making progress, still weighed down with some baggage from our past that can't be simply ignored, carried by people who can't be simply condemned.

Obama's speech was important. It was honest and healing in its overall effect. It was a speech very few Americans could have given, that virtually any Americans can benefit from hearing. But it was long overdue. By previously running a campaign that avoided any focus on race, Barack Obama temporarily leap froged the issue he was always fated to address; the lingering racial divides, justice imperfectly served, and the unvanquished suspicions and grievances that fosters.

Obama's greatest hope and biggest promise; furthering America's unity as a people, is linked to progress in this realm, and his political quest now is linked to that progress as surely as Jackie Robertson's skill at baseball linked him to the civil rights struggle in 1947. Obama delayed fully answering this aspect of his calling. In an irony for a politician accused of pushing words instead of action, Obama's action in announcing as a viable Black candidate for President had a profound and positive racial impact, but the healing power of his words in that same arena was unfortunately delayed in coming.

In his speech Obama correctly observed that his campaign placing a mixed race African American on the threshold of winning the most powerful job on Earth is a real marker of our society's racial progress, but it goes far past being a mere marker; Obama's campaign is a dynamic process playing out in real time toward an uncertain conclusion. Win or lose, Obama's candidacy has the potential to actively drive America's racial progress forward dramatically. But it also has the potential to significantly set it back. Glass ceilings don't dissolve; they shatter on impact, leaving jagged edges exposed in the process. And those have the potential to wound.

It was realistically impossible to avoid Race in this election, but facing it did not have to further divide us. Yet to an uncomfortable extent it has. Rather than helping us embrace the progress our society has made, this primary season gave voice to a litany of complaints about progress not yet realized. A problematic die got cast when the Obama campaign actively resisted Obama being viewed as the black candidate for President. It came from an understandable concern, a fear that being seen as "the black candidate" would make Obama less trust worthy to whites who in most places make up the large majority of voters. But since he literally isn't just another in a long string of white Presidential candidates, embracing a post racial identity became Obama's only other option,

So there was no major early campaign speech about race relations in America delivered by Barack Obama. And the potential controversy about Obama's long term relationship with Reverend Wright and his Afro Centric ministry was not preemptively defused. Instead Obama ran an early campaign that sought to transcend race, an option admittedly that most white politicians in America have by default. But in Obama's case that meant underplaying the obvious, that Barack Obama is the first black man in America with a very real chance to be elected President, and what that actually means to America.

For Democratic partisans outside of the Obama camp, public references to race, even where race has an obvious and relevant electoral connection, became risky lest they be construed as race based pigeon holing of Barack Obama as "the black candidate", employed to his perceived disadvantage. The margin for error in comments became narrow and brittle, the thought police grew active, charges and counter charges flew, and overall bitterness grew. Race came close to becoming the third rail of 2008 Democratic primary politics, more than likely to harm anyone who touched on it.

Prior to Barack Obama delivering his speech on race relations in America, fierce partisanship regarding his Presidential ambitions dampened most chances for mutually respectful discourse about race in America between Democrats of differing allegiances. The truth is that under any circumstances it is difficult for most Americans to calmly discuss race outside of their closest circles, with forgiveness implicitly extended to those who misspeak or misstep, let alone those whose meaning simply gets misunderstood in the midst of an attempted dialog.

And in a politically charged climate where even indirectly racially related comments tend to be viewed in the least favorable available light, dialog quickly becomes poisonous. If the standard we must be measured by now is post racial, it's no wonder we periodically fall short, our social healing is incomplete, and many sharp edges remain. As Barack Obama poignantly expressed while discussing Reverend Wright's emotionally charged words; we are getting closer, but we simply aren't there yet.

We aren't there yet when Barack Obama attempts in his speech to explain his compassion for human frailty regarding racial issues by describing his White Grandmother's fear of unknown Black men on the street, and that is immediately seized on in the media and by some opponents as evidence of Obama being disrespectful to his loving white Grandmother. We aren't there yet when Barack Obama makes an off the cuff, in some surface way less than flattering comment about "the average white voter" during a radio interview, and that is twisted by the media and some of his opponents into evidence of Obama's own racial prejudice. And we aren't there yet when Hillary Clinton making reference to the importance of LBJ to the completion of Martin Luther King's life work gets twisted by the media and some of her opponents into her being disrespectful and unappreciative of the contributions King made to America, and an inability of black people in general to accomplish much of anything without white help.

We aren't there yet, and that's OK, as long as we keep moving forward and don't slip further behind. It worries me though when two white politicians who for decades fought in the American south, and in Washington DC, for the rights and dignity of African Americans citizens become identified as racial villains in the eyes of many of their fellow Democrats. It worries me also when the contents of one of the most profound speeches in a generation calling for and pointing toward racial healing in America, gets spun against the man who wrote it as evidence of his prejudice by many of his fellow Democrats. We have to turn this around, all of us. We choose to want a nation where an African American male and a Caucasian woman can compete against each other to become President of the United States, knowing only one can win, believing the one who loses won't lose because of their race or gender. But that can never happen if we insist on thinking the worst of those with whom we don't completely agree.