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I had a very positive reaction to Obama's race speech, somewhere in the ballpark of Charles Murray's. A few days later, though, I don't think it really solved his Rev. Wright problem.

Consider the widespread handwringing over this controversial YouTube video, the one that got Soren Dayton suspended from the McCain campaign when he included in his Twitter feed. The editing tics are annoying, and the 60s timewarp images are unnecessary. It makes sense for the McCain campaign to keep this kind of stuff at arms length.

But treating it like it's irredeemably racist and beyond the pale is a pretty over-the-top reaction -- and it seems to be a surprisingly common one. What exactly is so unconvincing about the creator's statement that the video isn't meant to portray Obama as a "scary black man?" It portrays him as unpatriotic, and places him in a tradition of black nationalist radicalism. It may be an unfair critique -- Obama's speech made clear that he has a nuanced view of race that's different from Jeremiah Wright's (though I'm not so sure that gets him off the hook for indulging Wright and his church). But it's hardly the same thing as portraying him as a crack-addled mugger.

But Democratic superdelegates probably think that it is the same thing. If it sends them into a panic that the evil racist Republicans are going to steamroll Obama with evil racist attacks, that gives Hillary a leg up, doesn't it?