Three things stood out to me:

1) As I noted earlier the fact that he rightly and profoundly added the plight of many white Americans and immigrants who feel anything but privileged in this country to his rhetoric.

2) His admittance that he has heard uncomfortable sentiments from his pastor before.

3) His argument in support of Rev. Wright and how it contrasted with his call for Don Imus to be fired just a few short months ago and how his campaign has portrayed the Clintons and their supporters.

I won’t go into the first because I already did, but I wanted to just touch upon the other two. The LA Times did some parsing of Obama’s speech noting something that immediately stood out to me and undoubtedly many listening. Obama said:

“For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely -– just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.”

Here is the problem, in a statement made on the Huffington Post Obama said “The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation.” He also noted that the first time he heard those particular statement was a year ago at the start of his campaign.

Obama has been running a campaign about honesty, integrity and changing politics and has repeatedly hit Senator Clinton for taking multiple stands on issues and making conflicting statements while using Washington-speak. However what he said in the HuffingtonPost article juxtaposed with his speech sounds an awful lot like old politics from the Illinois Senator.

It is easy to make a qualified argument, to say “I was not there FOR THAT statement” instead of admitting that you know something is a pattern of thought or action regardless of whether you heard the specific quote(s). So yesterday, we learned that the Senator at least knew his pastor used language and expressed ideas that made him uncomfortable. So if, as he said earlier, he had never known his pastor to say anti-American and anti-white language and he had never heard his pastor give blame for 9/11 to the US either in public or private, then what did he hear that made him uncomfortable?

That is something that will only get parsed down further. Instead of just admitting this is a pattern of thought the Senator was familiar with from Reverend Wright in the first place, his somewhat veiled denial has been followed by an admission giving the impression that he was trying to hide something. The story will now have a few more days to grow and pass into the public concious, new information keeps stories in the papers, on the airwaves and online and I have the feeling there is more here than less.

The public now is left to ask “what did you hear that made you uncomfortable” and “why did you continue going there after hearing it?”

Finally we get to Obama’s non-denouncement-denouncement of Wright. Again you can argue both ways about whether it was right or wrong, christian or not, that isn’t important to politics. What is important is that it is a sign of intellectual inconsistency and a line of reasoning that could really hurt him if used in the right way.

Senator Obama was the first candidate to come out and call for NBC to fire radio talk-show-host Don Imus when he made a racially insensitive remark. It was a remark that was hurtful but compared side-by-side with Rev. Wright’s comments, well, lets just say IMHO Wright’s comments are so universally and patently offensive they almost can’t be compared with the statement Imus was fired for.

In his speech Obama denounced his pastor’s statements but went against the media’s portrayal of the man he knows. During the Imus scandal most Democrats had no problem denigrating the host and pointing to other comments he had made as a pattern of racist thought. The same can easily be done with Jeremiah Wright yet in this case because of his personal relationship, Obama cannot let go of his friend as easily as he asked a corporation, sponsors and listeners to let go of a talk show host.

If I were a right-wing blogger I would summon up the deepest and darkest sentiments of the many white voters that Obama is now desperately trying to bring back to his campaign. I would say Obama is asking the public to accept a different set of standards for Wright than they did for Imus, I would say it is a representation of many aspects of affirmative action that many white’s dislike the most. Then I would ask, as President will Obama be asking Wright to give sermon’s at the White House? Will he be preaching to guests, will he be attending ceremonies, finally will he be giving Obama the same private counsel as President he has for twenty-years as a private citizen a state legislator and a Senator?

Liberal and black Americans will despise such questions and attacks, just as conservatives despised the anti-American statements expressed by Wright. In this Obama has been backed into a corner. Knowing full well with whom he was associated he has built a campaign about equality, racial harmony and an end to the old ways of thinking, but the old ways still exist for much of the nation and now we find they exist to some degree with one of his closest personal advisors.

There is much to respect by the Senator’s decision not to throw his pastor under the bus for the sake of his political career. The campaign is no doubt hoping American’s will see the action as one of forgiveness, the Christian thing to do. However this action would have been much easier to respect had the Senator not joined in the chorus that thre Don Imus under a bus for political gain or had he not allowed his campaign to throw Geraldine Ferraro under that same destructive vehicle or had his campaign not parsed the Clinton language to stir racial outrage in South Carolina. Clinton asserting that Lyndon Johnson played an important role in Civil Rights that MLK could not is hardly as destructive as yelling “God Damn America”.

While the Senator has been running a campaign message of change, his organization has also jumped on every chance it could to drum up the old style of liberal attack, to play “I gotcha” politics, digging through a persons life and language and seizing any nugget it can to portray them in a negative light and charge racial or gender intolerance. It wouldn’t be the first time a politician hasn’t lived up to their message but unfortunately for the Senator he now has a symbol of his inconsistency that we can all hold up as evidence.

I doubt this moment will kill his career or hand the nomination to Senator Clinton, plenty of time exists in the campaign and he is still the clear frontrunner. There is plenty of ammunition here and as wonderfully crafted as his speech was, there are lingering questions that must be addressed.