One thing that occurred to me listening to Chris Matthews gush over Obama's speech is that it's just become harder for the Clinton campaign to fan its media-bias narrative, even though the gushing is, if anything, only intensifying. It's one thing for the campaign (or "Saturday Night Live") to protest fawning media coverage when Obama's talking about feel-good themes like hope. It's quite another to protest it when he tackles a subject as fraught as race, at least as honestly as he did today.
In general, my brief stroll through MSNBC's primetime lineup tells me the media's love affair with Obama is alive and kicking. This speech seems to have made the talking heads feel so good about Obama (and themselves) that they'll have a hard time dwelling on Rezko and Wright over the next few days.
Mike's certainly right that low-information voters will strongly influence the effect of this speech. But it would be a mistake to write off the elites. They were as important an audience as anyone today. And so it's not trivial that Obama won them over.
--Noam Scheiber