The Kid Gloves Come Off
Well, it was a great ride, having Mr. Obama as the uniter-not-divider, painless "Change" agent, and racial-healer-in-chief, but it's over now.With the mainstream media's revelations about Jim Wright and his position in the life of Barack Obama, the mask is off, and the squeaky-clean candidate is now exposed as a man whose spiritual mentor has a fire-and-brimstone message of the indictment of America on racial grounds.
Read the transcripts of "Pastor" Wright's speeches, and despite the tone and delivery, the words could have been written by Osama Bin Laden himself.
The double standard is especially delicious; can we imagine the press showing any kind of deference to a candidate whose spiritual advisor was a white supremacist? Just look at the blows delivered to those who associate with the comparatively benign Pat Buchanan or Jerry Falwell. The bloggers at DailyKos are falling all over themselves to praise Obama's almost hyperactive twisting and spinning in his speech today - where he sort-of-renounces-but-really-doesn't - Mr. Wright's contentions that the CIA invented AIDS, and the government crack, specifically to harm black people, or that America "deserved" 9/11. Well, the chickens have indeed come "home to roost", but not in the way Mr. Obama wanted.
Try to imagine what the rank-and-file union-style Democrats in the rust belt and such places will think of this montrosity in the form of Mr. Wright, and Mr. Obama's blithe attempts to shoo away this controversy, as though he were swatting a mere fly.
Mr. Obama may have salvaged his campaign today, at least among those weepy DailyKos types and the usual gaggle of confused youths and college students, but adults don't care for this type of crap, and they will not elect someone president who reserves the possibility of not only entertaining views such as Mr. Wright's, but flat-out embracing them.
Shelby Steele has written eloquently of the process of whites' trading in their guilt for redemption from blacks, who in turn demand symbolic offerings, such as preferential college admissions. It is difficult to imagine the Obama campaign as representing anything more to mainstream America; from reading the policy positions on Mr. Obama's site, there is scarcely anything that differentiates it from that of Hillary Clinton or John Edwards, so the unique promise of the Obama campaign is that it offers some mystical and symbolic racial healing - although no one ever seems to come out and say so directly; it's almost always attributed to some vague and mysterious - yet huge - bloc of American voters. Thus it shall be with the Obama campaign.
Not long ago, an article was forwarded to me called "Don't beLIEve racism will end by politics", by a fellow called Tim Wise. It put forth the unremarkable contention that electing Barack Obama as president would do nothing to end racism or racial friction. The article itself was mostly boilerplate pointing a vague finger at white people's ongoing position as the oppressor of America's black population, and was attempting to serve as a warning that electing Obama would do nothing to help this situation.
What was so interesting about this experience was that I couldn't have agreed more with the author's conclusion - that Mr. Obama's ascension to the presidency would have no effect on race relations at all - but the avenues we traveled to arrive at this conclusion couldn't have been more different. Mr. Wise briefly cites such questionable evidence as black incarceration rates, crime, poverty, and disease to paint a picture of white America perpetually oppressing blacks.
It never occurs to Mr. White nor any of his star-struck Obama fans that the highly visible suffering of many of today's black people may just have something to do with the decades of policies put in place by the black community's self-appointed "Leaders" - the totally lame "Great Society", the pointless lowering of college admission standards, and the Democrat/teacher unions' iron lock on school resources that allow well-placed and well-heeled members of the machine to enjoy comfortable jobs with tenure, while actual learning and content are dumbed down in favor of self-esteem and historical revisionism, while armed gangs continue to attract new members as Federal money is plowed into ridiculous schemes that would be laughed out of any serious budget - but the bargaining that Shelby Steele has described is powerful enough to make even the most determined and committed bureacrat look the other way while academic performance and the encouragement of high levels of achievement are swept away in favor of feel-good tokenism.
Does Barack Obama actually transcend race, the way he's been only too happy to allow us to believe? Or are the man's views better illustrated by Mr. Wright's call to "God DAMN America"?
Obama will continue to distance himself from Mr. Wright, but most people with an ounce of common sense will recognize that a person who sits in the pew of a particular pastor for twenty years, donates thousands of dollars to that pastor's church, is married to his wife by that pastor, and has his children baptized by that pastor, will have bought into those viewpoints - at least to some degree - and it's highly insulting to our intelligence for him to compare Mr. Wright to a slightly nutty old uncle - the analogy holds no water at all.
It's the end of the free ride for candidate Obama, and not a moment too soon. It was difficult to imagine anything more horrifying than eight more years of the Clinton machine, but between her and Mr. Obama - now and forever associated with the America-hating, white-people-loathing views of Mr. Wright, which do you think most grown-ups would choose?
posted by ET @ 3:33 PM
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