They called it Barack Obama’s “Mitt Romney” moment, but it was anything but.

Whereas Romney gave a self-serving speech that glossed over details of his own faith in an attempt to appeal to the public, Obama this morning confronted the issues of race, racism, anger and the future head on.

Where Romney was inauthentic, Obama was real. Where Romney was evasive, Barack was precise. Where Romney had base motives, Obama had a lofty premise.

This was Barack Obama’s Barack Obama moment, and he handled it with flying colors. (No pun intended.)

Obama had a big job in front of him this morning when he took the stage in Philadelphia. He had to get beyond the focus on his now-former pastor’s incendiary rhetoric, the fiery cadences of a black preacher born of the pain of segregation and the scars of the civil rights movement. He had to convince white America that he wasn’t the same kind of radical, saying “God damn America” in his heart if not on his lips.

And as far as we’re concerned, he did it.

To his credit, Obama didn’t toss his former pastor overboard, something that would have been very easy to do, especially given his popularity with the public. It would have been the politic thing to do as well, the ritual sacrifice upon the altar of political success.

Obama didn’t. He denounced the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s words, but not the man. And even more important, he noted that we all have something to learn from the Jeremiah Wrights of the world. “He contains within him the contradictions, the good and the bad, of the community he has served for so many years. I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community,” Obama said. “I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother.” And again: “These people are part of me, and they are part of America, this country that I love.”

America may have done away with segregation, but its effects still linger, Obama said. And until we deal with those, we will not have made a more perfect union, and the anger will persist. “And to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots only serves to widen the chasm between the races.”

We can ignore the issue of race in society, and continue just as always, but nothing will change, Obama said, adding “This union may never be perfect. But generation after generation have shown it can always be perfected.”

You can argue that Obama was simply trying to move the media focus from his pastor and the ugly things shouted from that pulpit at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago years ago. And perhaps he was.

But isn’t he right? Isn’t it time we moved past those things, and confronted the hard work of dealing with race in America, not just as a political issue, but as people?

Call us crazy, but we think so. And it seems to us that Obama is the person perfectly suited to do just that.

It seems we’ve got a bit of a medical rebellion on our hands! At least one member of the Nevada Board of Medical Examiners, and the board’s executive director, are refusing to quit as requested/demanded by Gov. Jim Gibbons. And others are saying that the board members shouldn’t resign, even if they do have ties to Dr. Dipak Desai.

(Speaking of Gibbons, just a question for the fine web folks over at the Review-Journal: Is it really necessary to use that huge picture of the governor’s head on your homepage? Seriously, people sometimes call up web pages when driving, and that could cause accidents.)

Anyway, despite the fact that both the Las Vegas Sun and the Review-Journal have done a good job demonstrating that Gibbons’s approach to the crisis has been a mixture of procrastination, misinformation, underreaction and overreaction, one thing is clear: The governor has the right to say who sits on these boards, and if Gibbons wants people to quit, they’d be wise to quit.

Now, you could make the argument that the board members with ties to Desai have already done the right thing by recusing themselves from the case, and that’s all they need do. You could make the argument that medical board Executive Director Tony Clark’s idea — hiring temporary board members for this case only — is a good one. And you could argue that the medical board itself is not designed for fast response to a crisis such as the one we face now, where at least 40,000 people may have been exposed to a deadly virus, allegedly due to ridiculous cost-saving procedures in local clinics. (For lightening quick response, you need Mayor Oscar Goodman and his business license team!)

All are legitimate arguments.

But here’s the bottom line: As fun as it may be to defy the governor, that’s not what this crisis needs right now. What it needs is a board that’s unquestionably going to address itself to the task of fixing what’s wrong with the clinics, and making sure that any doctor who has done wrong never practices in Nevada ever again. That result will only be delayed by board members who refuse to go when Gibbons wants them to go. Like it or not, Gibbons is the governor.

And don’t forget: This is the governor who instituted a constitutional crisis in his very first week in office, all so he could get the guy he wanted on the Gaming Control Board. Does anybody think Gibbons isn’t ready to go the distance with the medical board, now that the governor has stopped performing a colonoscopy on himself and is finally aware of what’s going on (more or less)?

That’s doubtful. So let’s get the recent unpleasantness behind us, shall we, so we can start dealing with the real issue?

This just in: Judge Quackenbush has declared a mistrial in the Medical Mafia case.

Says Nevada’s presumably frothy-mouthed U.S. Attorney in a release:

“A mistrial was declared today in U.S. v. Noel Gage following the jury’s inability to reach a unanimous verdict,” said Nevada U.S. Attorney Gregory A. Brower. “The Government is very confident in its case against this defendant and looks forward to a retrial.”

As we reported back in November, theft from passenger bags is at an all-time high at both McCarran International Airport and other terminals across the nation. From the airline gate agents who check travelers’ suitcases to the Transportation Security Administration screeners who poke through bags, luggage at McCarran is groped more than a Vegas stripper. TSA officials — who, ostensibly, are there to keep passengers safe — are still reeling from a series of undercover operations which have nabbed some of their own personnel for stealing from travelers.

The latest blow to the the Bush administration’s ever-evolving air travel safety scheme? A government audit reveals faulty data on terrorist watch lists keeps innocent people under scrutiny while real-life terrorists temporarily fly under the radar.

Gee, maybe the ever-growing snowball of a principled collective dis against Gov. Jim Gibbons — from the Clark County Commission to the Legislature to the wailing blogosphere — generated so much momentum that when Gibbons finally emerges from his fog of unreason and actually makes a sound judgment call — asking for the resignation of members of the state Board of Medical Examiners who’ve been a bit too chummy with Dr. Dipak “Double Squirt” Desai — the conflicted med hacks are emboldened and also join the resistance.

You know, just because they can.

The powerful shudders rolling over my body are from the cognitive dissonance of … rooting for Gov. Gibbons?!