As a Chicago organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, I was standing in a sweaty but ebullient crowd in front of the Lincoln Memorial that torrid August day when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his epic “I Have a Dream” speech.

I was in front of my TV set nearly 45 years later, on a comfortable couch, teacup in hand, watching Barack Obama deliver what is certain to be viewed as the most important single statement on race in America since King. That statement was profound, confronting racism at many levels and explaining anger, frustration and hostility on both sides of the sadly remaining color divide. Not even King took that on.

Yes, it was a political speech, but unlike any heard in my lifetime, including John F. Kennedy’s asking us to ask what we can do for our country. The only speeches that came close in style and intellectual content were back in 1952 when Adlai E. Stevenson promised “to talk sense to the American people.”

That year encompassed another strange parallel—Richard Nixon gave his now sneerable “Checkers” speech in a high-stakes effort to save his own career. Nixon was then the GOP vice presidential nominee, enmeshed in a slush-fund scandal and about to be removed from the Eisenhower ticket.

Nixon talked mush to the American people, blathering about a “good Republican cloth coat” and his affection for his cocker spaniel named Checkers.

Obama’s speech was an intellectual roll of the dice, attempting to reverse the serious downtrend triggered by his pastor’s now immortal, incendiary sermon against America, played endlessly on TV and the web.
Obama could have pandered—tossed the pastor under the bus, to use one of this campaign’s tiresome jargonistic clichés. Instead, he talked sense to the American people.

Nixon pandered, talked mush and won. Stevenson talked sense and lost.

The question now, which will not be answered for some weeks, is whether Obama’s brilliance and sometimes discomfiting candor will lead to victory or defeat in the nominating process or later in the general election.

We know that association with his pastor cost him precious points in most polls. It cost him points in the remaining primaries against Hillary Clinton and some national polls show he lost his overall lead against her. Others now show him losing to John McCain in the general election.

What we now know—less than a week after the speech—is the bleeding has stopped and a possible uptick has begun. We know that a significant, better than two-to-one majority of Democrats and independents do not believe he shares his pastor’s views. It is almost a month until the Pennsylvania primary—time to recover, if he is to recover.

He remains the likely Democratic nominee—no way Clinton can overtake his delegate lead, though she can come closer in the popular vote.

But the nomination is still in the hands of the superdelegates, whose judgment will now get down to one issue and one issue alone: Can he win in November?

That’s a difficult calculus. The polls are slightly against him at the moment. Certainly Clinton will continue to pick the scabs off of every wound, working to discredit him with the supers in any possible way.

The big question remains: Will talking sense about our most damaging, still unresolved American dilemma work today? We’re at a moral and political turning point and I don’t know the final direction yet. Nobody does.

But I do know that if this country rejects him after that magnificent statement of position and principle, it’s a sign that we probably don’t deserve an Obama yet.

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Don Rose, an icon in Chicago and national civil rights and liberal politics, is a regular political columnist for The Chicago Daily Observer.