Over the past two days and nights, ending sometime around 2 a.m., Barack Obama worked on today's speech addressing race in America. He supposedly authored most of "A More Perfect Union" alone, showing it only to a few top advisers.

I'm not going to attempt a summary or offer much of an analysis. That's been done, and even the best don't do the speech justice. But his closing argument was a familiar one to his campaign: "We have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle...or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina, or as fodder for the nightly news...That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, 'Not this time.'"

Here's the problem: The damage done to Obama's campaign by a few seconds of video can't be undone by an equally short rebuttal. Knowing this, he took more than 30 minutes to carefully explore the issue and make the case that he was in a unique position to lead both black and white Americans past the old racial divisions. How that message will translate politically remains to be seen. The speech isn't easily digestible into a 10-second sound clip or a scrolling headline, and that's how many Americans are accustomed to receiving their news.

In a way, Obama's candidacy, and this speech in particular, will test our collective maturity level. Obama took the stage and essentially said: "It's time to sit down and have an adult conversation about race in America."

Are we ready for that conversation? Are we ready to even have adult conversations about politics? That would require a media that focuses on issues rather than sensationalized personal attacks and the day-to-day horse race. Considering some of the headlines immediately following the speech that narrowly focused on Obama's line that the constitution was stained by slavery, I'm not sure we're there yet.

It would also require a little more effort and serious participation from voters, many of whom dedicate more time to picking the American Idol winner or filling out March Madness brackets than to deciding who will head the executive branch for the next four years. How many people will take the half hour to watch the speech in its entirety? I guess we'll find out in the coming weeks.

You can watch the full speech below, or read the text here.