What he was getting at was the big question of the day: Would Obama's attempt to address this country's long-standing racial divide make a difference come Election Day?

For every undecided voter made even more hesitant in the aftermath of the broadcast and rebroadcast of those racially inflammatory images of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, would Obama's speech calm their fears? After all, as Obama infamously once pointed out, his talk yesterday had been "just words."

My friend, who for the record is as conservative as they come, was skeptical. So, I asked him, Did you listen to the speech? Did you read the text of it?

He hadn't.

I really think you should, I said. Because if you do, you'll see that Obama addressed some of the same issues you've been complaining to me about for years, such as how Irish immigrants were discriminated against in ways similar to blacks yet managed to get ahead nevertheless. And how resentful some whites are about affirmative action, as well as the problems surrounding chronic under-achievement among some African-Americans.

My friend looked surprised. He probably was expecting the usual rhetoric, the kind of stuff he snidely dismisses as "liberation theology."

If only he'd been with us yesterday morning as Obama, a man born to a black father and white mother and raised for a time by his white grandparents, discussed the racial divide from the various angles he'd seen. He spoke eloquently not only about how blacks look at race but also as how whites see it. How many times have you seen a politician do that?

"Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race," Obama said at one point. "Their experience is the immigrant experience. As far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything; they've built it from scratch.

"So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town, when they hear that an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed, when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time."

Then, Obama acknowledged that although these sentiments might not be expressed in polite company, they are lurking, simmering below the surface in the same way that rage on the part of many African-Americans still is. Racial prejudice and its legacy is the proverbial elephant in the room that people tiptoe around rather than acknowledge.

The brilliance of Obama's speech was that he would even attempt to address such a touchy subject. Instead of merely denouncing Wright and further distancing himself from his former pastor as he easily could have done, Obama seized the issue of race and put it in front of us in a way no one has dared in a long while.

It was the right message for this particular moment, in the same way that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream Speech" was and in the way that John F. Kennedy's speech about his religious faith was back in 1960.

If you ask me, I think that Obama has done what he can with this issue. The rest, really, is up to voters.

Not everyone will take the time to listen to the entire speech or to read the words that Obama spoke yesterday, although I recommend that every voter take just 20 minutes to do it. If you listen with preconceived notions of what he is saying, you may find it just rhetoric. But instead, if you suspend judgment for those 20 minutes, you may also gain insights into race relations in America from someone with a unique perspective. *