The Note: March From Madness

March 19, 2008 -- You can throw away your brackets -- here's a region's worth of match-ups that matter:

(1) Barack Obama vs. (16) Race

(8) Superdelegates vs. (9) Democracy

(5) Bill Clinton vs. (12) Bill Clinton

(4) Jeremiah Wright vs. (13) Geraldine Ferraro

(6) Clinton library records vs. (11) Tony Rezko trial

(3) Howard Dean vs. (14) Michigan/Florida -- play-in game for the right to face the chairman

(7) Sunni vs. (10) Shiite -- as officiated by John McCain

(2) Hillary Clinton vs. (15) Clinton legacy

All it took was a little big speech and a big little document dump to force a change of possession in the Democratic race.

No, the questions about Rev. Jeremiah Wright aren't going away -- but judge Sen. Barack Obama's speech like this: After hearty rounds of overwhelmingly positive reviews, on Wednesday, it seems, the campaign is ready to move on.

Obama, D-Ill., turns his attention to the Iraq war (that other rationale for his candidacy), and the National Archives is set to release 11,046 pages from the Clinton library Wednesday at 10 am ET -- enough schedules to make a guidance counselor blanch, and enough documents to keep reporters occupied for a while.

Also Wednesday, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., tries to go on offense -- she heads to Michigan to highlight her push to make the Wolverine State count. "Clinton supporters, including Gov. Jennifer Granholm, said the visit to a union hall in Detroit is aimed at whipping up support for the New York senator's push for legislation to allow an early June primary," Dawson Bell writes in the Detroit Free Press.

Key line: "legislative leaders said the proposal . . . won't go anywhere until Obama embraces it," Bell writes.

Obama's speech on race didn't answer all the questions, but he did reset the race, on his own terms (and probably quelled the serious unease in the Democratic ranks). Judging from the reviews, it was a success -- a measured, mature, and nuanced exploration of an issue that rarely gets dealt with directly in public forums.

"The speech was an audacious pivot, an attempt to broaden the focus from Obama's immediate political problem to the collective problem of America's struggle with racial issues," Thomas Fitzgerald writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

He thought and aimed big, in a speech that will be remembered for a while regardless of where his campaign winds up. "He confronted race head-on, then reached beyond it to talk sympathetically about the experiences of the white working class and the plight of workers stripped of jobs and pensions," Janny Scott writes in The New York Times. "Historians and others described the speech's candidness on race as almost without precedent."

His dance around Wright's words was among the more intriguing elements of the speech. ABC's Jake Tapper: "In an attempt to move beyond the controversy -- which has threatened to scuff the postracial unifying sheen of his campaign's promise -- Obama used Wright's anger as a way to explain racial grievances of both white and black Americans to focus on 'problems that confront us all' and move beyond 'a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years.' "

Might he have been a mite too careful with Wright? "Barack Obama's first major speech on race drew praise for its eloquence Tuesday -- but Republicans think he handed them a major weapon by refusing to disown family pastor Jeremiah Wright Jr., who is known for racially inflammatory remarks," Newsday's Glenn Thrush writes.

Context matters, and Obama would still rather not have been forced into giving this speech under these conditions. "It was a great speech," Lynn Sweet writes in the Chicago Sun-Times. "And it would have been greater if it were not delivered because Obama was in a jam."

It was a distinctly Obama production. "The result was not only the most extensive discussion of race to date by Obama, who generally has played down racial issues while seeking to become the first African-American nominated for the presidency by a major party," USA Today's Susan Page and Kathy Kiely write. "Tuesday's speech, historian Roger Wilkins says, was also the most extensive discussion of race ever by a presidential candidate."

"Not in decades has a prominent candidate so bluntly tackled the issue of prejudice," Mike Dorning and Christi Parsons write in the Chicago Tribune. "The address invited comparisons to John F. Kennedy's speech on his Catholic faith almost a half-century ago."

If this was his goal, he seems to have succeeded: "You could see race bubbling up in a way that was distracting from the issues that I think are so important to America right now," Obama told ABC's Terry Moran, in an interview broadcast on "Nightline" and "Good Morning America." "So what I wanted to do was to, rather than try to tamp it down, lift it up and see if maybe that would help clarify where we are as a nation right now on the issues."

How's this for an interesting racial divide? "Michelle and most of my black friends I think were much more confident and calm about me giving this speech," Obama told Moran. "My white friends and advisers were much more nervous."

He also said that he did not find Geraldine Ferraro's comments to be racist. And in that other critical national question involving race in American society, we learn in the interview that he thinks O.J. did it.

The speech may have brought Obama to earth -- in a good way. "For some voters, the speech might serve to remove the glow of optimism surrounding Obama's candidacy; but for many others, it could make him a more realistic president," Peter Canellos writes in The Boston Globe. "This wasn't the gauzy vision of diversity draped in tapestry metaphors and colored in rainbow hues: It was a nation confronting its sins and overcoming its deeply held fears and prejudices."

Maureen Dowd was impressed, and yet: "His naïve and willful refusal to come to terms earlier with the Rev. Wright's anti-American, anti-white and pro-Farrakhan sentiments-- echoing his naïve and willful refusal to come to terms earlier with the ramifications of his friendship with sleazy fund-raiser Tony Rezko -- will not be forgotten because of one unforgettable speech," she writes.

Among the great many raving: Andrew Sullivan, Charles Murray, Mike Lupica, John Dickerson, Dick Polman, David Brody, Eugene Robinson, and Richard Norton Smith.