The finest moment in Barack Obama’s transcendent speech on race yesterday was probably when he evoked his grandmother. For those of you who missed it, take time and watch it with your children later. But let me quote from the man himself (and the fact that he actually wrote most of this speech himself means we stand to elect, if nothing else, a great writer to the White House). The set-up, of course, was the flack he’s been getting for statements made by his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who critics have asked him to disown:

“I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community,” he said. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

“These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.”

We all have one of those grandmas, somebody in our family or in our past who loved us and let us down with their prejudices and their attitudes. It’s not a black thing or a white thing; it’s a human thing. Obama is not counting merely on the subtlety of his argument that black men of Wright’s generation might be entitled to some anti-American feelings (fear of black rage is something Republicans are dying to pounce on); he’s counting on our common, flawed humanity, and that enough voters of all races will recognize themselves, and their larger families, in his dilemma.

Was the speech too lofty for Joe Sixpack? Can’t tell yet. It’s probably not the kind of speech that is going to push him past Hillary in parts of Pennsylvania (of which longtime Clinton supporter James Carville famously said, “It’s Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between”) but I really think he was speaking more to the superdelegates, who represent not only Hillary’s only hope but who are also super-Democrats themselves, men and women who drank the Kool-Aid of our party — the ideals and, yes, the idealism — a long time ago.

There were a lot of ways Obama could have tackled the Wright problem, which Fox News and other hate mongers are determined to keep alive. He could have ignored it, he could have repudiated him and everything he stands for. Instead he gambled with a reaction that was complicated and intelligent and emotional, all at once, as if inviting us as voters and Americans to join him on a higher playing field. Do we have the guts to go there?

If you thought it was going to be simple with Florida, well then you have a really bad memory. That state’s Democratic Party has declared, on behalf of its voters, that Florida doesn’t want to vote again. Once was quite enough. Even if it was a sort of a pantomime equivalent of voting, in which actual ballots were cast but the results were determined ahead of time to be meaingless (which didn’t stop Hillary Clinton from showing up and acting as if she had won the sweepstakes). They were being punished by the national party for having held its primary early and the state’s poohbahs have tossed the ball back over the fence — like those mimes playing tennis in Blow-Up.

“This doesn’t mean that Democrats are giving up on Florida voters,” the FDP assured everyone in a memo. “It means that a solution will have to come from the DNC Rules & Bylaws Committee, which is scheduled to meet again in April.”

As much as that committee, headed by DNC leader Howard Dean, would like to toss that imaginary ball to someone else, the math finally frames the debate and gives us all an out (even those of us who didn’t do so well in math): Obama has more candidates and it’s impossible for Hillary to catch up. He also has a greater percentage of the popular vote and, barring a bizarre and complete turnaround, the equivalent of all Obama supporters staying home for all the remaining primaries, there is no way she can catch up there, either. Her argument that the Democratic nominee needs to win Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida to take the White House means a whole lot less when polls continue to show Obama beating McCain more handily, even in those states, than she would. What, Hillary supporters are going to stay home in November if she doesn’t get the nomination? Never happen. Whereas a good number of Obama’s troops, many of them first time voters, would certainly have reason to think the game rigged if the candidate with the most votes and delegates somehow didn’t get the nomination. Kind of reminds you of the 2000 presidential election, when the candidate with the most votes lost…

There is nothing wrong with representatives making a momentous decision as long as they truly represent the will of the people. Anyone who watched HBO’s John Adams last night got a good historical reminder of how the craven King-fearing representatives of some colonies almost kept us from fighting for freedom. (If you did miss the first two episodes of this bracing series, it’s being repeated on hundreds of HBO spin-offs as you read this, including HBO En Espanol. Watching our founding fathers arguing the fine points of the Declaration of Independence in Spanish makes me feel like I have entered one of Lou Dobbs’ nightmares.)

As much as I enjoyed the series more bold-faced portrayals — Paul Giamatti’s dyspeptic Adams, Tom Wilkinson’s rascally Benjamin Franklin — I was really taken with Broadway actor Stephen Dillane’s quiet take on Thomas Jefferson. It’s how Montgomery Clift might have played him: so still you have to pay attention. When you have the right ideas you don’t have to scream and strut. Something for all presidential contenders to remember.

Mother of mercy, could this be the end of Obama?

It’s hard to tell how political scandals are going to play and what kind of shelf life they will ultimately have. Some like Spitzer’s (below) come out of nowhere and swallow up whole careers and families in a tsunami-like instant. Others start off troubling and just get more so. The news about Obama’s break with his former pastor was getting a lot of play on the evening news last night, with CNN’s Anderson Cooper devoting his entire broadcast to it. and each of the network news program putting it at the top of their political coverage. The junior senator from Illinois made the rounds of the programs himself, telling anyone who would listen that he never heard the Reverend Jeremiah Wright declare this country ran on racism, or say, just days after 9.11, that the attacks were the result of US foreign policy karma.

What’s troubling is not the way the contretemps got heated up, either. John McCain pushed an editorial from the Wall Street Journal on reporters (so that’s where they get their ideas!) and Rush Limbaugh and the folks at Fox News (who still haven’t forgiven Obama for not wearing an American flag lapel pin) fanned the flames, sending thousands to see for themselves on YouTube. No, the thing that’s the most unnerving about this fiasco is the Clinton camp’s silence.

It’s no secret that part of her strategy has been to hang in there until something stuck to Obama, and this time it wasn’t even mud she or one of her minions tossed. (Neat how the Wright story pushed that Ferraro unpleasantness off the front page.) They have claimed for months that only once the press started looking hard at Obama’s background would his mettle be tested and in this case they might be right. Why wasn’t Obama’s campaign out ahead of this one? Given the rev’s shoot-from-the-hip style, in the already shoot-from-the-hip world of black preachers, shouldn’t someone have had a look at those tapes themselves? Now the press is sure to play gotcha, looking for proof that Obama was in church during a sermon when Wright was on record saying something controversial.

The great pity is that Obama wanted his campaign to get beyond the race issue and some of us have joined him in that hope (see more below). Now a bunch of potential voters are going to hear the same sound bites of Wright and confuse his rhetoric with the message of the candidate. Context means next to nothing in a political year: of course our history is racist, just as its obvious that Al Qaeda’s hatred of the US stems from our foreign policy history. But truth and nuance won’t get you to the White House.

The only good news in all of this was more bad news: stories of the government’s bailout of Bear Stearns pushed the Obama-Wright story below the fold ,or later in the program, and the dire predictions of many economists made the rantings of a retired reverend seem quite trivial indeed. On Jim Lehrer’s News Hour, the essential oatmeal of evening newscasts, Newsweek’s Jane Bryant Quinn was one of a chorus voices on the air last night telling Americans to fasten their seat belts.

“If you look at where America is in the world, relatively speaking, we are getting poorer, because we’ve been a debtor nation for so long,” Quinn told Judy Woodruff. “And the dollar going down means that internationally we are getting to be a poorer country, and we are not doing as well as we did in the past. This is going to be a hard thing for Americans to face.”

Feel better?

Is there anything left to say about the Spitzer scandal? It has to have set the land record for fastest revelation-to-elimination cycle of any modern political sex scandal (“In by Monday, out by Thursday”) and any TV talk show host who chose to take this week off could probably bring the house down just by opening with the line, “Did I miss anything?”

Our hyper-speed, internet-fueled, media-minded punditocracy sure didn’t. It reminds me of those Amazonian pirranha that strip a man down to his bones in a frenzied bloodlust… well, at least in a James Bond movie, which was where half of my childhood education came from. (The other half came from Mad magazine.) Watching the news cycle over the last three days, spending more time than usual at home with my ailing daughter, I have seen each possible angle picked up, run with and ultimately devoured. (The last line of interest is, of course, “Why are we all so interested?)

This time the fate of the political wives got more than usual traction, perhaps because Hillary is casting such a large shadow on our psychic landscape, or perhaps because Silda Wall Spitzer was so clearly devastated, standing beside Governor McLovin. “Why do the wives have to stand up there with them?” Franny asked when we were watching Keith Olbermann Monday night (that’s how sick she was!) and my line about the kabuki like dance to the death that is modern political marriage meant little to her. As I heard a comedienne ask at the end of that first evening (forgive me for not remembering who, there have been so many), “Why does the wife have to stand up there? Why doesn’t he stand up there with the hooker — that’s the one everyone wants to see!”

And now everyone has. Images of the real Kristen has been paraded all over the tabs and the talk shows and I bet visits to her My Space page came close to crashing the server. (I don’t know about you, but internet speed has been very slow here this week — don’t you think it’s Spitzer related?) She is, not surprisingly, an aspiring singer from a broken home. Who knows if those aspects of her personality were ever revealed to the governor (they did see each other more than once, you know). I like to envision a scene like those in Citizen Kane where the miserable millionaire and gubernatorial aspirant Charles Foster Kane starts visiting the chorine who would be the undoing of his marriage and political future. Nothing new here, keep moving.

A hundred years ago the Trial of the Century was that of Harry Shaw, a demented scion of a wealthy Pittsburgh family who murdered the lecherous NY architect Stanford White for White’s past dalliances with Shaw’s wife, a singer herself named Evelyn Nesbit. She came to be known, in tabloid legend and later movies, as the Girl in the Red Velvet Swing. White, who was presented as a serial defiler of young women in Shaw’s seven-month trial, had a special little love nest on in the Flatiron District where he entertained the teenaged Nesbit; she would swing in the red velvet swing, unencumbered by unessential clothing until White finally pounced.

It was a little game they played, just their little secret until the whole world came to know about it. (The phrase, “Would you like to come up and see my etchings?” came out of that trial as well — it was one of White’s pickup lines — and entered the popular consciousness.) It’s doubtful anything quite as memorable will come out of the Spitzer imbroglio — Client Nine just doesn’t have much of a ring to it — but at least it will all be over sooner. The Nesbit story had legs. Why it was just a few months ago that the building that housed White’s literal swing house collapsed. That was just an old structure, his former trysting spot, meant to fall apart. White’s family was never the same, either.

What to make of the suggestion being floated by the Clinton camp that Obama might be her running mate? First Bill came out and endorsed the idea over the weekend, saying the match-up would make “for an almost unstoppable force.” (What is an “almost unstoppable force,” anyway? Is that like the New England Patriots?) Then Hillary said in a campaign rally that she had heard from voters who said they wish they could vote for both her and Obama and she replied, “Well, that might be possible someday.” Even PA governor Ed Rendell got in on the act, saying on Meet the Press Sunday, “It would be a great ticket.”

The day wasn’t over before Obama threw some cold water on the Clinton fantasy, pointing out that he had more delegates than she did, had won more states than she had and in poll after poll was considered a stronger candidate to beat John McCain in November. And he added a reference to the logic behind HIllary’s three am phone call ad: “I don’t understand. If I’m not ready, how is it that you think that I should be such a great vice president?” he said at a rally in Columbus, Mississippi. “You can’t say that he’s not ready on day one — unless he’s willing to be your vice president, then he’s ready on day one.”

The problem with either combo — Clinton-Obama or Obama-Clinton — is that both candidates would have to then campaign wearing T-shirts that said I’m With Stupid. You can’t trash somebody for being an inexperienced jive-talker or a duplicitous pushover for seven months and then marry them on the eighth, can you? I mean it happens in Shakespeare and Hollywood romantic comedies, and there have been some odd pairings in presidential races within memory. (How about the first George Bush and his derision of Ronald Reagan’s “voodoo economics”? Didn’t stand in the way of walking down the aisle with the voodoo priest himself.) But if Clinton says Obama is not ready to be president, he’s not ready to be vice president, because the stand-in aspect is the most important part of the job. And if part of Obama’s argument for him over Hillary is that she has more negatives — smoking baggage with stickers that say Whitewater and Travelgate on them — bringing her along would only ruin the party. If not the Party.

Speaking of stupid, it also appears that the little girl seen sleeping so soundly in Hillary’s three am ad is not a little girl anymore: she’s a 17-year-old Obama supporter named Casey Knowleswhose stock image was used in the ad without her knowledge. Now she is lighting up the morning talk shows, labeling the spot “fear-mongering” and “a cheap hit.” Free publicity! And a reminder that you don’t want to make a woman look the fool on a national stage, even if she was just pretending to be asleep.

Just ask Mrs. Eliot Spitzer.