A while back, while I was deep in the midst of my maundering [1] three-week [2] wander [3] through the deep thickets of the conservatives' pet cultural change strategies, Digby offered up a post [4]that illustrated, in far more practical terms, my series' overarching point, which is this: The battle we are fighting is not a political war, limited to the narrow transactional field of elections, politicians, and issues. (If it were that simple, we'd have won it by now.) The war -- as the conservatives told us right out loud from the beginning -- is an all-out culture war. And the only way to win it is to reach beyond politics and offer our own vision of cultural transformation.

This morning, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama showed us precisely how this is done.

I should preface this by saying that the following is not any kind of endorsement of Obama as a candidate. I haven't come out publicly for any candidate; and beyond that, CAF has a rather strict deal with the IRS that we don't do that kind of thing. But I do want to call out the speech he gave in Philadelphia today as an example for the ages of how powerfully effective the kind of transformational approach the conservatives used can be—especially when it's put to work in the service of the liberal worldview.

To recap the situation: Obama's been in trouble with the corporate media for the past week over intemperate remarks made by his pastor of 20 years, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The remarks, which people familiar with the rhetoric of black churches can tell you are common enough fare in pulpits across the country, were an incendiary condemnation of America's racist history. They weren't pretty, and apparently they gave a lot of white folks pause. They also gave the cable talking heads—who were about due to turn on the Democrats' Golden Boy anyway—the hook they were looking for to make a dramatic and ugly narrative turn.

Obama had already made a few clear, brief statements condemning the remarks, but also saying they were a small part of the character of the man he knew. These attempts to smooth things over were largely disregarded, and the media firestorm gathered force. Finally, Obama's instinct for transformational politics kicked in—hard. And the speech that resulted didn't just get him out of this one tight pinch; it also took the entire conversation into the deep transformative well of values, vision, and worldview -- a place from which he began to reframe our entire stagnant national conversation on race.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past."

Obama took honest stock of America's racial landscape in 2008, laying out the current conditions faction by faction. Over here is where Wright and his generation of black Americans are. It's not hard for thoughtful, honest people to see how they got there. And there's plenty of evidence that the struggle that wore them down is still going on.

And, he continued, white folks are over there, just as stuck—especially working- and middle-class Americans who are feeling their traditional economic privileges evaporate, and immigrant families who are seeing the dream recede before them. Worst of all, said Obama: we've all retreated into angry, isolated corners that are so far apart that we don't even try to have conversations over the gap any more. We are all stuck here—locked together and apart in a trap most of us hate, but few of us know how to get out of.

After that, for the first time in ages (possibly since Dr. King died), an American leader dared to reframe the conversation in a way that clearly laid the blame where it really, truly belongs—on those who would rather have us divided by race than united by class:

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. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

Getting past our racial stalemate, Obama concluded, will require us to unite against our real common enemy—the private/public partnership of elites that's closed off advancement routes for everyone. It will require us to avoid making the mistake Wright made, assuming that society is static and nothing can ever change. And it will require us to refuse to be distracted, as we've so often been in the past, by racial politics that pitted one group against another so that those elites could win.

Then, to prove that this is possible, he painted vivid, heroic historical pictures of times in the past that Americans of all races did rise up and transcend the old divisions. He appealed to the basic morality and decency of all Americans, deftly invoking his own religious beliefs in a way that was inspiring, inclusive, and not particularly offensive. He offered the ideal of a "more perfect union"—not ever perfect, but constantly moving toward greater perfection. Finally, he finished the whole thing off by tying it back to the country's essential creation stories about the Founders, grounding his frame in our deepest foundational ontology about what it means to be American.

All in all, it was a rhetorical tour-de-force. And was a textbook example of what New York State Senator Eric Schneiderman (whom Digby quoted) described as the way progressives need to be communicating now:

"Transformational politics requires us to challenge the way people think about issues, opening their minds to better possibilities. It requires us to root out the assumptions about politics or economics or human nature that prevent us from embracing policies that will make our lives better. Transformational politics has been a critical element of American political life since Lincoln was advocating his "oft expressed belief that a leader should endeavor to transform, yet heed, public opinion."

The need for a renewed focus on transformational politics is obvious when we compare the success of the conservative movement over the past 30 years with the collapse of the American progressive coalition. The important thing about contemporary conservatives is not just that they won elections—it's how they won. They didn't win by changing their positions or rhetoric to move toward the voters—or where polls told them the voters were. They won by moving the voters closer to them, paving the way for the last decade of conservative hegemony."

The speech also reflected Obama's intuitive understanding of many of the strategies I've been writing about the past few weeks, the ones the conservatives relied on as the main weapon in their national hijacking of the country's entire view of reality. In particular:

• He challenged the dominant ideology by showing us that his predicament was a direct result of the cramped, artificial, strained nature of our conversation on race. He reached out beyond the particulars of his situation, and showed us the broader forces at work. And then he offered all of us a plausible, compelling way out.
• He showed himself as a thoughtful, moral man who could, for all his inexperience, be trusted to lead the country to a new place.
• He presented a long-term vision firmly rooted in the moral values of the liberal worldview -- and then compassionately tied that vision to the daily dilemmas in which both black and white Americans find themselves. And he suggested ways for us to be there for each other.
• He clearly enunciated those core values—and tied them back into our historical roots, our foundational myths, and our (deeply eroded) sense of shared national identity.
• He made us feel that those of us who choose to re-engage this conversation were Good Guys. None of us is bad or wrong (one of the conservative rules was no whining or blaming); but the truly cool people going forward will be the ones among us who take on the difficult work of getting us past this once and for all.

Once more, let's move back to Digby's article on transformational politics to tell us why we need more of this—why it is, in fact, the only way we're going to find our way back to a progressive America:

The 40-year campaign to persuade Americans that their best interests are served by serving the wealthy has been thoroughly internalized and will take a lot of work to unravel. Progressives still have a lot of work to do to insure that the terms of the debate will be firmly on the side of average Americans instead of the moneyed interests, that civil liberties are fundamental American values and that we take our moral and ethical responsibilities as a wealthy, first world nation seriously. The only way to do that is to truly transform the way people think about their government and their elected leadership.

Cramped transactional politics should not be used as a definition of progressivism. While they are a necessary part of the system, they cannot fuel a transformation of our politics. Our job as activists is to pressure and prod our elected representatives to advance the progressive project and reward them when they do it. Winning office should be the beginning, not the end. Transformation is not just a goal, it's a process.

Today, we all got a historic glimpse of what that process looks like. Will it get the media to back off? Probably not: they're still mired in the old conservative narratives, and one speech—no matter how breathtaking—isn't going to change attitudes that were 30 years in the making.

But if we're going to break down those attitudes, this is how all of us need to be speaking, everywhere and forever, until the country begins to understand the values that drive us and the story we have to tell. Win or lose, Obama took us to school today, and showed us all how transformative politics is done.