Think it’ll have anything to do with the forces of division starting to raise their ugly heads?

Barack Obama will give a major speech on “the larger issue of race in this campaign,” he told reporters in Monaca, PA just now.

He was pressed there, as he has been at recent appearances, on statements by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

“I am going to be talking about not just Reverend Wright, but the larger issue of race in this campaign,” he said.

He added that he would “talk about how some of these issues are perceived from within the black church issue for example,” he said.

Maybe “the government lied about Pearl Harbor” is all a big cultural misunderstanding? Expect lots of redemption rhetoric about the Messiah rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the black nationalist movement he patronized for 20 years and how it’s objectively anti-progress to hold that inconvenient fact against him. Exit question: It’s good news, at least, that the congregation apparently no longer regards “Middleclassness” as some sort of vestige of slavery, isn’t it?

Update: Sounds like he’s going back to the cherry-picking defense, which, as others have pointed out, works for absolutely no one except Obama. Lott didn’t get a pass for it when he rued the day a segregationist like Strom Thurmond lost the presidential election; Michael Richards didn’t get a pass for it when he had a meltdown at that comedy club. The Messiah and his disciples are held to a different standard, thankfully.