There’s been a ton of analysis of Barack Obama’s speech yesterday, so the whole thing isn’t worth reviewing. There is, however, one point that I have not seen made elsewhere that I wanted to bring up.

This was, I think, the key sentence in Barack Obama’s speech yesterday. It was about his pastor, Jeremiah Wright:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.

A lot of people are still criticizing Obama because they can’t understand how he could continue to attend a church where the pastor believed the things that Jeremiah Wright professes to believe in his own sermons. Wright’s beliefs are not only hateful and divisive, but in some cases also downright ludicrous. This is a man who has said that he believes the US government created HIV as a tool for genocide in the inner cities.

What they don’t get, and what Obama tried to explain, is that these kinds of views are not uncommon in African American society. There’s a reason why Wright was able to keep his job as long as he wanted in spite of giving the sermons he gave.

If you can’t accept that an African American might associate with people who believe those sorts of things, then you may as well say that you just won’t vote for African Americans.If you want to challenge those beliefs, it’s probably best to start by acknowledging that they’re out there and that they’re widespread.

The other day my (white) barber told me that Monsanto, Bill Gates, and some other shadowy powers are selling genetically engineered corn that makes people infertile in Africa in order to stop population growth. I’m going to keep letting him cut my hair. Does that render me unfit for public office?

Update: Anyone have a link to the text or video of the infamous 2003 Jeremiah Wright speech? If so, please post a link in the comments. You could buy a DVD containing the sermon from the United Church of Christ until recently, but they don’t appear to be selling it any more.

Tyler Cowen posts about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on the same themes that I was trying to hit last night. His post has the advantage of being both shorter and more erudite. He argues that the differences between the two are aesthetic, which I think is exactly right:

The two candidates represent two diametrically opposed portraits of the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Should we expect beauty, grace and universality, or should we derive our feel-good sentiments about politics from righteousness, confrontation, and sheer dogged persistence and feelings of ultimate desert?

Preface this by noting that I’m no political analyst and some would say that my abilities as an analyst of human nature are lacking as well. In spite of those insufficiencies, I’ve been trying to figure out what’s kept Barack Obama from breaking through with a wider swathe of Democratic voters.

Needless to say, given a formidable, well-funded opponent who started with the support of the party establishment and massive name recognition, he has done remarkably well. In spite of a suboptimal result on Tuesday, he’s still got the inside track on the nomination, and he has raised a ridiculous amount of money so far. The people who support Obama really, really support Obama. He does well among independents, but never seems to be able to get more than half of the self-identified Democrats to support him, and I have a theory of why that’s the case.

What strikes me about Obama is that as a politician, he seems unwilling or even unable to campaign based on negative emotion. I mean something different here than negative campaigning, which is usually defined as trying to drive up the negative impressions voters have of your opponent rather than trying to drive up the positive impressions they have of you.

Obama always wants to appeal to our hope for a better America, and to the idea that if people work together, they can effect change. What he seems to avoid is playing to fear, envy, greed, and the other negative emotions that are the refuge of the demagogue. Every once in awhile he’s willing to tap into indignation, but that’s about as far as he’ll go. The medical insurance flier that his campaign produced that tries to scare people about Hillary’s health care plan is notable mainly for the fact that it’s unusual. Most politicians serve voters a daily diet of this stuff.

The problem for Obama is that these are the kinds of appeals that are most effective with a large number of voters. They want red meat. John Edwards based his campaign on setting working people against corporations and rich people. Hillary Clinton is trying to dispatch Obama by making people afraid that he won’t keep America safe, and afraid that they won’t have health insurance if they don’t vote for her. She’s also worked hard to make Democrats afraid that Obama’s national security credentials make him an unable to beat McCain. Why is Hillary more compelling than Obama on NAFTA? It’s because she’s willing to play on people’s fears of foreign workers taking their jobs. President Bush’s entire political strategy has been to keep people in fear.

Because Obama is unwilling to go that route, he gives away the votes of people who respond most passionately to those emotions. That’s my theory, anyway.