"I shuddered only once while watching Barack Obama’s speech last Tuesday," Bill Kristol says today in the lede of his Times article, "Let's Not, and Say We Did," which argues against the necessity of the momentous speech on race Senator Obama delivered last week. Ironically, I shuddered throughout Kristol's article, with the hardest convulsions happening here: "The last thing we need now is a heated national conversation about race. … A new national conversation about race isn’t necessary to end what Obama calls the 'racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years' — because we’re not stuck in such a stalemate."

Perhaps Kristol is right. According to the National Urban League's most recent report, black Americans continue to trail whites in income, education and health. That's not so much a "stalemate" as it is "losing."