Obama Ipsum

Today there are 12 million undocumented immigrants in America, most of them working in our communities, attending our churches, and contributing to our country. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding.

She was born in a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas. We have real enemies in the world. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles - principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation.

The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. This country is more generous than one where a man in Indiana has to pack up the equipment he's worked on for twenty years and watch it shipped off to China, and then chokes up as he explains how he felt like a failure when he went home to tell his family the news. Six million Jews were killed - more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today.

Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company.

It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional candidate. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality. These challenges are not all of government's making. If your hopes have been dashed again and again, then it's best to stop hoping, and settle for what you already know. We have the most powerful military on Earth, but that's not what makes us strong.

Thank you.