Changing the Core Message of His Campaign. In all the ecstatic praise for Obama’s speech, there’s been little comment on the way the talk signals a dramatic, permanent, and possibly fatal alteration of his race for the presidency.

Until today, the Illinois Senator enjoyed spectacular success with his determination to run as the first-ever “post-racial” candidate for the White House.

He refused to allow himself to be pigeon-holed as “the black candidate,” and tirelessly emphasized his desire to unify the nation (“We’re not red states or blue states—we’re the United States of America!”). His campaign succeeded in large part because he implicitly promised to move our society beyond the long and tragic centuries of racial agitation and pain. Yes, he won overwhelming support in the black community, but he also drew huge majorities in states like Iowa, North Dakota, Idaho and Utah, with miniscule populations of African-Americans.

For more than a year, Obama has been offering a weary nation an irresistible deal. As Hoover Institution scholar Shelby Steele observed in his superb book “A Bound Man,” Barack represented the ultimate “bargainer” in a long history of African-American leaders who became popular by suggesting they could reduce white America’s burden of guilt. By generally avoiding discussion of race or race relations, Obama suggested that in supporting his candidacy, Americans could finally escape from the hurts and resentments of the past.

Here’s the deal, he seemed to say: if you elect me, we can at last put an end to all the lectures and breast-beating about our brutal racist history. When I stand on the steps of the Capitol building and take the oath of office as your president, that very act will put an end- forever- to the idea of African-Americans as second-class citizens. Rather than endless recriminations and accusations, we’ll all stand together as equals in the eyes of God and the U.S. Constitution.

Millions of Americans – including some conservatives who should have known better- rushed to take that deal, and embraced Obama’s candidacy.

But now, at a decisive point in the race, the candidate has abruptly changed the bargain.

Rather than promising less race consciousness, he now insists we need more. Instead of bidding to lead a post-racial-- or at least a post-racist—America, Obama’s speech tells us we must go back to picking at the old scab.

Actually, Barack was right the first time: putting race aside, affirming our common Americanism and humanity, can serve to heal old divides. Obsessing on racial divisions, focusing on “blackness” or “whiteness,” perpetuating the eternal cycle of grudge and guilt, only intensifies the fever associated with the nation’s most menacing disease.

Bill Clinton also believed that we needed more talk about race, and as president he participated in a series of televised “public dialogues” (amounting to tiresome gripe fests) that achieved nothing at all other than underlining Slick Willie’s enlightenment and compassion.

If the Obama campaign follows up on his over-praised speech and makes intensified race-talk into a new national priority, he may well destroy his chances of winning the presidency. The most “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party could celebrate prospect that a President Obama would get countless opportunities to deliver more lectures on slavery, Jim Crow, oppression, and race differences.

But less politically correct Americans may prove notably less eager to seize the chance for additional solemn scolding sessions like the one they just heard in Philadelphia. Most voters, black as well as white, feel weary and wary of the destructive cycle of accusation and apology, so that Obama’s new implied promise of a presidency of endless race-based agitation may well constitute an offer that we easily can refuse.