Everybody's still talking about Obama's speech on race, so I might as well put in my two cents. Was it self serving? Of course. He's a politician in an election year. But I mostly thought it was damned good.

Too many politicians, when confronted with embarassing statements by a friend, will either dissemble---"I didn't know", "that's out of context", "you're just bringing this up to attack my candidacy"---or else throw their friend under a bus.

Obama did neither. He denounced Pastor Wright's inflammatory rhetoric, but he didn't abandon him. That's how real people do it. That's how I do it.

One of my friends is a bit of a racist, to the point where she will occasionally drop the N-word into our conversation. I don't like it when she gets that way, but there's not much I can do to change her mind, and I'm not going to kick her to the curb just because her behavior is sometimes distasteful. You just don't do that to friends.

Only someone with obscene political ambitions would choose friends based on how good they'll look in an election year. I think pretty much the same thing goes for pastors.

(Actually, that's another issue. Most people don't choose a pastor, they choose a congregation. Churches serve a social function as well as a religious one, and the pastor is only part of the package. I imagine there are days when people listening to Wright's sermon just role their eyes at the things he goes on about. That's part of the fun.)

Obama's larger message about race relations in this country sounded pretty good too. Basically, he pointed out that there's been an ongoing struggle over race since this country was founded, that things have been improving steadily, and that people of all races have genuine reasons to be angry or fearful about the process. Then he called on everyone to put aside fake election-time racial issues---who said what, what did they mean, and who's outraged by it---and focus on the real problems we all face together. Only he said it better than I did.

It was a message of conciliation and unity, but I also think he was very politely warning his opponents: In a battle of words over whether the friends of white or black candidates are more racist, the white folks are going to lose.

Still, it was nicely done. Instead of spouting slogans, Obama treated his audience as adults who could understand the nuances of friendship and community and politics and race.

It also doesn't hurt that I agreed with almost everything he said. But "almost" leaves room for a couple of problems. The first one is here:

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.

Why is it that so many political liberals hate corporations? This just seems terribly misguided to me. Corporations are the mechanism by which we can quickly, efficiently, and voluntarily aggregate the resources of thousands of people toward a common goal. Without them, we'd be a third-world nation. They are the engines of our national prosperity.

I'm not saying that corporations don't end up doing some really bad things, but that's because they are run by people, and people sometimes do bad things.

Also---and this is one of the key policy differences between liberals and libertarians like me---most of the really bad things done by corporations are only possible because some government is helping them. Corporations like Pfizer or Target can't take people's land by eminent domain, only governments can do that. Corporations can't force anyone to do anything, except with the help---or at least the acquiescence---of governments.

Those lobbyists and special interests Obama talks about wouldn't be able to dominate Washington if our congressmen and president weren't so eager to let them. Before blaming the business world, Obama should clean his own house.

The second problem with Obama's speech is here:

This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

There are at least three problems with that sentence. First, there's nothing wrong with making a profit. If it weren't for profits, nobody would invest in corporations, and they wouldn't employ people to make stuff.

Second, corporations don't switch to overseas factories to make a profit. They switch to overseas factories to lower their cost of production. If they're lucky, they might be able to keep some of the savings and make a profit---at least for a little while---but usually they are forced by competition to pass their savings on to consumers. That's because their competition is also lowering costs with overseas production, and if they didn't lower prices to match, they'd lose their market share and go out of business. Corporations ship jobs overseas to lower consumer prices so they can stay alive.

The third problem really stinks up Obama's speech. He's allowed his anti-corporate obsession to corrupt his egalitarian impulses. When corporations "ship our jobs overseas," they give them to other people, people who in most cases need them more than we do. Apparently those other people don't count in Obama's calculus.

At the start of his speech, Obama makes a point of mentioning that his father was from Kenya. Obama supports increased immigration, so I guess it would be okay with him if Kenyans came here to work in an American factory. So why would it be wrong for an American company to bring the factory to the Kenyans?