About 48 hours after his “A More Perfect Union” speech, Barack Obama went on a sports radio talk show in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Host Angelo Cataldi brought up Obama’s speech on race and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, homing in the part where Obama discussed the white grandmother who helped raise him and the contradictions that she herself embodied.

“The point I was making,” Obama said, “was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity, but that she is a typical white person. If she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, there’s a reaction in her that doesn’t go away and it comes out in the wrong way.”

Immediately, the press seized upon this comment, and specifically Obama’s use of the term “typical white person.” So did some sites in the blogosphere.

Why? Why does the mainstream media - and mainstream America - insist on taking imprecise phrases and assigning them the worst possible implications?

It’s an exercise in brainlessness.

It’s also what Obama warned about in his speech, when he noted how easy it is, even using as an example Geraldine Ferraro’s remark about him personally — and how little courage it requires to take a single pull quote or a clip or caricature and to simplify the negative “to the point that it distorts reality.”

The conversation Obama wants requires a tolerance of the imprecise; that public figures and private citizens alike no longer speak in sterile, meaningless language with the primary aim of giving no offense to anyone for any reason.

If polled, most people claim they want this in a public official. Finally, now one of our three remaining candidates for President of the United States offers it.

The result? Public outcry.

Raising the level of debate in this country can only take place if we put a stop to our obsession with pull quotes and begin exploring, instead, some of the deeper context surrounding them. We are all complicit - this site included.

And we must do better.

If we can’t reject the notion that ambiguity is bad, and rise above this disturbing notion that the entire world is (pun not intended) black and white, we will only continue to live in fear of one another, and of our own progress.