Obama's Test

Few speeches on race have drawn the kind of attention that was given to Senator Obama's remarks yesterday at Philadelphia. We wrote yesterday that it would be a tremendous opportunity for the senator, and he rose to the occasion. The speech was beautifully spoken, logically thought out, balanced, and wise. The senator displayed capacities of both personal loyalty to his friend and pastor and a preparedness to speak hard truths to both sides.

And yet the speech, like the senator's campaign, has a maddening quality. For when the senator got to the part that touched on what might be called policy, it was like he suddenly abandoned his capacity for daring and retreated into Democratic Party shibboleths, blaming the war and corporations and using Marxist-type language about how corporations are shipping jobs overseas for "nothing more than a profit." It is demagoguery to talk about a solution to race problems by turning to protectionism.

This country has largely defeated, with the help of a civil rights movement of extraordinary heroism, the de jure barriers to minority participation in the American economy. What it needs to defeat now are the policies that keep the economy from growing to its fullest potential and that threaten to end the long boom that has been underway since President Reagan first began to liberate the economy to provide incentives to work and to earn and to profit. The test for Mr. Obama, if he is nominated, will be whether he can see his way to these principles before Americans go to the polls in November.