If you haven’t already done so, Barack Obama’s More Perfect Union speech today is well worth watching. It’s an extraordinary piece of political positioning.

Over the last few days, Obama has been attacked (by whom is controversial, and not really very important) for his association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Wright is a former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, a huge Chicago church that Obama attends. The churchgoers there are mainly (but not exclusively) black, and the culture derives from black churches. I’m not a Christian or African American, but I understand that it’s not unusual for the sermons to be political and provocative, and you’re not expected to agree with everything the pastor says. Wright is, by all accounts, a genuinely good guy, but there are a few bits and pieces of video from his long years of service that can be taken out of context and make it look like he hates America. Which is exactly what has happened.

The conventional wisdom is that when this happens to a politician, there’s not much they can do to fight it. People get their news from TV, and TV news only plays short clips of video. No matter how right you are, explaining the facts is going to take too long. They’ll play the out-of-context clip over and over, but they’ll never play your reply no matter how good it is. So you can’t afford to respond, all you can do is denounce the person who embarrassed you and try to move on. Not that that works either, because your enemies can keep talking about the clip, which gets it played over again. In short, there’s not much you can do except go and find your own short out-of-context clip to embarrass your opponents. If you have too much dignity for that, you’ll lose. At least, that’s the conventional wisdom.

In this speech, Obama does an end-run around conventional wisdom. He doesn’t denounce Reverend Wright, but praises his long history of good work. Then he goes on to talk about racism in America – not just that it’s a bad thing, but how it works in the minds of otherwise good people, including his own grandmother. Then he reaffirms that he’s not going to run a negative campaign, and goes out of his way to defend his opponents from a couple of spurious accusations. It takes forty minutes, and it got one live airing on CNN. It’s never going to play in its entirety on mainstream TV news, and there’s plenty in there that could be taken out of context in a ten-second video clip and destroy Obama’s campaign forever.

But… Obama’s campaign knew that the speech would go straight to You Tube, and most people would get it there instead of from TV news. So it’s worth the risk to be dignified, rational and thoughtful.

There was a famous debate in the 1960 election between Nixon and Kennedy. When people were polled on who they thought had done better, the radio audience distinctly favoured Nixon, and the TV audience distinctly favoured Kennedy. If it had been 1950, that would have meant Nixon had won, but by 1960 television mattered more than radio, and Kennedy eventually won the election.* I think Obama has just expertly played a similar shift in public attention.

* OK, granted he only won by carrying the important demographic of dead people from Chicago, but the debate was still important.

I started shaving in high school, because there was a rule saying I had to. As near as I could tell, the rule had first been established by Alexander the Great, but since he wasn’t my field commander I was unclear on why I was expected to comply with his manual of military conduct. I didn’t see any functional reason for engaging in the sisyphean endavour of removing hair from my face every day, and I knew I was going to stop as soon as high school was finished, but I complied with the rule because I didn’t care enough one way or the other to make a fuss about it. I had a second-hand 1960s electric shaver that my grandfather had originally bought in the 1960s, and I made a token effort to pretend I had no beard. In the last week of the seventh form the shaver finally died, and I didn’t bother to replace it.

After a few months my beard was long enough that I felt I ought to trim it for general tidiness, much as people get their hair cut even though they don’t shave it all off every time. I found that scissors weren’t the perfect tool, so I began to use a hair trimmer for the shorter bits of beard on my cheeks. This seemed perfectly fine for several years, until I became a teacher myself, when I felt obliged to buy a proper electric shaver to trim my cheek hair more closely than can be achieved with a hair trimmer. And I carried on with that until yesterday, when it occurred to me that even my electric shaver was still pretty hopeless, and maybe I should try one of those manual shavers that people use when they think of what they’re doing as actual shaving instead of my own mental model of the behaviour as trimming my beard really really closely.

So I bought one, and it turns out they’re really good. Who knew?