Juan Williams with Adam Green of MoveOn

Juan Williams, of Fox and NPR, doesn't think Obama closed the deal with yesterday's speech. From his Fox commentary:

Obama has vigorously disavowed Wright’s inflammatory remarks, but in Tuesday’s speech refused to disavow the pastor himself or the 20-year relationship he’s had with him. Some political observers say the Illinois senator still has some more mending to do.

“I think it goes on,” National Public Radio national correspondent Juan Williams said of the controversy.

Williams, a FOX News analyst, questioned why Obama allowed himself to remain publicly associated with Wright. He said Obama did not address the “judgment and character” issues that he’s running on.

“I think he had to take responsibility … and that’s what he didn’t do,” Williams said.

He was equally unimpressed on NPR this morning (transcription mine)

You know, that's the problematic heart of this controversy. The question is why Obama has maintained a relationship with Reverend Wright, a man who has said things like the government is pumping drugs into the black community or spreading AIDS among people of color has said that America's foreign policy is somehow equal to that of the terrorists who attacked on 9/11. The idea that his grandmother expressing concern about black men as you just said is quite different than Reverend Wrights's statements - Obama said yesterday those were divisive, hateful statements - and somehow Barack Obama tried to make them parallel in scope.

Needless to say Williams' paraphrase of Wright's statements is a bit, shall we say, heated, but I can see why he would take anger and suspicion from a preacher in the inner city who lived through Jim Crow much more seriously than an innocuous thing like hearing from the grandmother who raised you while your mother was thousands of miles away that she feared and distrusted people who look like you.

Clearly Juan Williams is much more sensitive to the nuances of divisiveness than I am. F'rinstance, I thought this was a divisive statement.

And I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship. It was the same, and that's really what this society's all about now here in the U.S.A. There's no difference. There's no difference. There may be a cultural entertainment -- people may gravitate toward different cultural entertainment, but you go down to Little Italy, and you're gonna have that. It has nothing to do with the color of anybody's skin...

Later, during a discussion with National Public Radio senior correspondent and Fox News contributor Juan Williams about the effect of rap on culture, O'Reilly asserted: "There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, 'M-Fer, I want more iced tea.' You know, I mean, everybody was -- it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn't any kind of craziness at all."

Guess not

Juan Williams: It’s rank dishonesty, and the troubling thing is that if I hadn’t participated in the discussion, if I was just tuning into CNN, or listening to MSNBC, and heard that, oh, Bill O'Reilly said he went to Sylvia’s restaurant in Harlem and they weren’t using M-F and all this kind of stuff, I’d say, “Oh my god. What is he thinking? Where’s that coming from? Why did he say something like that?” Not understanding that that discussion, Bill O’Reilly, I’m telling you, it’s so frustrating. They want to shut you up. They want to shut up anybody that has an honest discussion about race.

That's not completely fair. I'm much more fair and balanced than that. I think you should shut up too.