Two birds with one stone: he reassures the racist cretins who’ve been demagoging him from the left that he is in fact “authentically black” while also hinting that if we’re worried about what happens to a dream deferred, we had best make sure the deferral ends soon. Like, say, next November.

It’s worth noting that Obama himself isn’t directly quoted as saying an “eruption” is imminent, but the AP seems to have taken his meaning pretty clearly. Nothing like a veiled threat of violence to liven up a primary, eh?

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Tuesday that the Bush administration has done nothing to defuse a “quiet riot” among blacks that threatens to erupt just as riots in Los Angeles did 15 years ago…

Repeatedly, he referred to the riots that erupted in Los Angeles after a jury acquitted four police officers of assault charges in the 1991 beating of Rodney King, a black motorist, after a high speed chase. Fifty-five people died and 2,000 were injured in several days of riots in the city’s black neighborhoods.

“Those ‘quiet riots’ that take place every day are born from the same place as the fires and the destruction and the police decked out in riot gear and the deaths,” Obama said. “They happen when a sense of disconnect settles in and hope dissipates. Despair takes hold and young people all across this country look at the way the world is and believe that things are never going to get any better.”

Exit question one: Does the guy who fancies himself the candidate of “healing” really want to go this route? Exit question two: In the face of such hopelessness, just how audacious is the “audacity of hope,” anyway? (Exit answer: Audaciously audacious!)

Update: Marc Ambinder has the full speech. Precisely what you’d expect: he’s careful to say that violence is “inexcusable” and “self-defeating” while also making it sound kind of, well, inevitable and understandable if things continue as they are:

Those “quiet riots” that take place every day are born from the same place as the fires and the destruction and the police decked out in riot gear and the deaths. They happen when a sense of disconnect settles in and hope dissipates. Despair takes hold and young people all across this country look at the way the world is and believe that things are never going to get any better. You tell yourself, my school will always be second rate. You tell yourself, there will never be a good job waiting for me to excel at. You tell yourself, I will never be able to afford a place that I can be proud of and call my home. That despair quietly simmers and makes it impossible to build strong communities and neighborhoods. And then one afternoon a jury says, “Not guilty” — or a hurricane hits New Orleans — and that despair is revealed for the world to see.