Sen. Barack Obama has just delivered another spellbinding speech, this time on racial reconciliation. It was eloquent and it was brilliant. Senator Obama did not ignore or minimize this country’s tortured racist past, but he offered hope that, ultimately, we could rise above it.

In the course of his speech, he disavowed the inflammatory statements made by his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, without disowning the man who had been his friend and mentor. Rather, he said, in effect, that Rev. Wright’s sentiments belonged to the past that we must rise above.

To me, the crucial paragraph of the speech was this:

“The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country –- a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen –- is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope –- the audacity to hope –- for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”

These are noble words; healing words; a statesman’s words. If Sen. Obama can back up these visionary words with forward-looking actions, he might make a great president.

The question is, can he? Or is he bound hand and foot to those Democratic Party constituencies most resistant to change –- such as the AFL-CIO, the trial lawyers and the teacher unions.

Republican strategist Karl Rove shrewdly put his finger on Obama’s dilemma in a column he wrote in the Wall Street Journal last month.

“The truth,” declared Rove, “is that Mr. Obama is unwilling to challenge special interests if they represent the financial and political muscle of the Democratic left. He says yes to the lobbyists of the AFL-CIO when they demand card-check legislation to take away the right of workers to have a secret ballot in unionization efforts, or when they oppose trade deals. He won't break with trial lawyers, even when they demand the ability to sue telecom companies that make it possible for intelligence agencies to intercept communications between terrorists abroad. And he is now going out of his way to proclaim fidelity to the educational unions. This is a disappointment since he'd earlier indicated an openness to education reform. Mr. Obama backs their agenda down the line, even calling for an end to testing, which is the only way parents can know with confidence whether their children are learning and their schools working.”

In this latest speech, as he has in other speeches, Sen. Obama even managed to pay lip service to conservative ideals. In this latest speech, it was to the “notion of self-help.” Clearly, he’s trying to appeal to Americans of all ethnic backgrounds and all political persuasions. But unless he can resolve the contradiction between his high-flown rhetoric and his catering to left-wing special interest groups, he runs the risk that many Americans will sooner or later come to regard his speeches as just so much Chinese food: Forty-five minutes later, you’re hungry.