Bathe me in racial guilt and flatter my intellectual pretensions

He said his campaign presents a powerful message of unity, but his words stoked racial unease and divisiveness. ...he couldn't quit talking about people in terms of their color and ethnicity.

-- David Limbaugh

There are reams of reactions to Obama's speech. My favorite bit so far is by Charles Krauthammer:

.... Obama's purpose in the speech was to put Wright's outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. And by history, he means the history of white racism. Obama says, "We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country," and then he proceeds to do precisely that.

What lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination? Jeremiah Wright, of course.

This contextual analysis of Wright's venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It's the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That's why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination.

That would be found in the Washington Post... The Speech:
A Brilliant Fraud.

I don't know my way around the lefty blogosphere, but here's one liberal blog - called Dropout/Postgrad - that explains the attraction (prior to the speech, just Obama in general):

.... We need a shock to the system. We need the first half-black president of Harvard Law Review to become the first half-black man to sit in the White House. This isn't about race. This is about the system. This is about the system needing a jolt. This is about the system needing someone at it's helm who clearly has risen due to merit, not connections and privilege. We need someone who isn't going to rise to the top on an entitlement empowered dream of dominance. We need someone who is curious, tenacious, calmly self-confident and sharp-witted. We need someone who can compromise and listen, who will tell it straight without being intimidated or cowed by the desire to have everyone like him. We don't need another Bill Clinton. We could definitely benefit from the first Barack Obama. We need a cigarette-smoking, poker-playing, strategic thinker with a mean jump shot. YEAH I SAID IT!

Being a smoker myself, that's one thing I don't hold against Obama:)