I doubt this was intentional, but Barack Obama’s speech yesterday served as an important prophylactic for his campaign. By seeming to speak candidly about race — which is to say, he said we should speak candidly about race, which is not actually the same thing as speaking candidly about race but sounds as though he were speaking candidly about race — he held his standing and position with his passionate supporters in and around the media primarily (I lost count of how many bloggers on the Left said they had tears in their eyes yesterday listening to or reading the speech). This was no small matter. When a candidate finds himself in a swirl of controversy, the danger is two-fold. First, he will lose his step and not secure future support and future possible voters. Second, he will lose the people who have sworn allegiance to him already, who will decide they’ve either been had or that they now see a side of their chosen candidate they hadn’t seen before and fall out of love.

 The revelation, a week before the 2000 election, that George W. Bush had not revealed a 25 year-old drunk-driving arrest fit neatly into the second category, as it is likely he lost enough votes among evangelicals in Florida from that bit of news to turn that state into a 36-day jump ball. The Wright remarks offered the possibility of a similarly disaffected second look at Obama. And by turning on the charm and utilizing his capaciously writerly language  in a manner sophisticated enough to warm the cockles of Todd Gitlin’s oft-disappointed onetime-student-radical-now-with-an-AARP-membership-card heart, he shored up his support with his core supporters.

The big question is what people who are not yet firmly in his camp are thinking, and, more broadly, how the large number of independent voters are going to feel about all of this should he get the nomination. It may well all be a matter in the past by the time the autumn rolls around.

Or it may well not be.