Mark Steyn notes that with his speech this week on Reverend Wright, Senator Obama has revised and extended his remarks from his speech in Philadelphia. As Steyn notes, "great-speech-wise, it’s a bit like Churchill promising to fight them on the beaches and never surrender, and then surrendering a month and a half later, and on a beach he decided not to fight on":

The [Philadelphia] speech was designed to take a very specific problem — the fact that Barack Obama, the Great Uniter, had sat in the pews of a neo-segregationist huckster for 20 years — and generalize it into some grand meditation on race in America. Senator Obama looked America in the face and said: Who ya gonna believe? My “rhetorical magic” or your lyin’ eyes?

That’s an easy choice for the swooning bobbysoxers of the media. With less impressionable types, such as voters, Senator Obama is having a tougher time. The Philly speech is emblematic of his most pressing problem: the gap — indeed, full-sized canyon — that’s opening up between the rhetorical magic and the reality. That’s the difference between a simulacrum and a genuinely great speech. The gaseous platitudes of hope and change and unity no longer seem to fit the choices of Obama’s adult life. Oddly enough, the shrewdest appraisal of the Senator’s speechifying “magic” came from Jeremiah Wright himself. “He’s a politician,” said the Reverend. “He says what he has to say as a politician… He does what politicians do.”

The notion that the Amazing Obama might be just another politician doing what politicians do seems to have affronted the senator more than any of the stuff about America being no different from al-Qaeda and the government inventing AIDs to kill black people. In his belated “disowning” of Wright, Obama said, “What I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I'm about knows that — that I am about trying to bridge gaps and that I see the — the commonality in all people.”

Funny how tinny and generic the sonorous uplift rings when it’s suddenly juxtaposed against something real and messy and human. As he chugged on, the senator couldn’t find his groove and couldn’t prevent himself from returning to pick at the same old bone: “If what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that’s enough. That’s — that’s a show of disrespect to me.”

And we can’t have that, can we? In a shrewd analysis of Obama’s peculiarly petty objections to Rev. Wright, Scott Johnson of the Powerline website remarked on the senator’s “adolescent grandiosity.” There’s always been a whiff of that. When he tells his doting fans, “We are the change we’ve been waiting for,” he means, of course, he is the change we’ve been waiting for.

“Do you personally feel that the Reverend betrayed your husband?” asked Meredith Vieira on The Today Show.

“You know what I think, Meredith?” replied Michelle Obama. “We’ve got to move forward. You know, this conversation doesn’t help my kids.”

Hang on. “My” kids? You’re supposed to say “It’s about the future of all our children,” not “It’s about the future of my children” — whose parents happen to have a base salary of half a million bucks a year. But even this bungled cliché nicely captures the campaign’s self-absorption: Talking about Obama’s pastor is a distraction from talking about Obama’s kids.