If Obama's objective with Tuesday's speech on Jeremiah Wright was to cue a standing ovation from his fully invested fans in the liberal media, it was a phenomenal success. Take, for example, yesterday's editorial from the Seattle Times:
In the annals of American history, a watershed moment should come from "A More Perfect Union," Sen. Barack Obama's powerful speech linking 221 years of race relations ... Far from Obama's candidacy being hobbled by the controversy, the moment showed his courage and statesmanship, qualities that make him fit to lead the country.Watershed, yes, but a watershed of sophistry, cynicisim, disingenuity, moral equivalence, deflection, evasion, excuse-making, subject-changing and avoidance of responsibility. As Roger L. Simon put it more eloquently and politely than I ever could, the speech was "bullshit". The very last things Obama demonstrated were courage, statesmanship, or any shred of integrity or the ability to unite and lead anybody who hasn't already endorsed him.
Among the statements that disturbed me the most [transcript]:
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.No, the problem with Jeremiah Wright is not about the black community. It is a problem with one paranoid, hate-filled, venom-spewing, anti-American, anti-Semitic crackpot, and it is a problem with one presidential aspirant who displayed the indecency and the poor judgment to associate himself so closely with the crackpot for so many years. And it was awful for Obama to change the subject away from Obama's embrace of Wright despite his long track record of disgusting utterances, and elevate Wright into a sympathetic wounded creature and symbol of racial misunderstanding. And it was awful for Obama to downplay the extent of Wright's depraved extremism by equating it with his own grandmothers private (and unspecified) misperceptions. And it was awful to excuse away Wright's toxic weirdness by claiming that:
I'm sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.Of course, many of us have heard our clergy say things we've disagreed with, but I have never heard of any rabbi affiliated with any congregation that I've been part of say anything extremist and offensive, certainly nothing approaching any of the many outrages that we have heard from Jeremiah Wright. And who among us would continue to embrace for twenty years a rabbi or minister who repeatedly said irrational things that shocked and offended us? No, the moral equivalence and the downplaying and excuses won't cut it. Neither will the vague rejection of non-specific "controversial remarks".
For Obama to reassure the skeptics and quiet the critics, what he needed to do was to focus on Wright, not change the subject to a non-sequitur discussion of race relations, unequivocally renounce his relationship with Wright, and use the opportunity as a "teaching moment" for Wright's followers and specifically respond to Wright's nutball comments, along the lines of:
"No, the pulpit is not a place to say "God damn America". It is a place to ask God to bless America and to thank him for the many blessings he has bestowed on our great nation"
"No, we did not bring the September 11 attacks upon ourselves, we were attacked by implacable fanatics who seek to destroy our way of life, our freedoms and our diversity of faiths"
"No, the United States government did not invent the AIDS virus, it spends billions of dollars a year trying to find a cure".
"No, Israel is not a dirty word or a terrorist state, it is a democracy, a friend and an ally, and we stand with her people as they struggle every day to defend themselves from those who wish to destroy them"
etc.
And he also needed to say that he could not remain part of a church community that disseminated such vicious nonsense from its pulpit.
But he did not say what he needed to say because he could not. Because to do so would invite questions about why he chose to adopt Wright as his spiritual mentor and to embrace him for 20 years, and give the church tens of thousands of dollars and subject his impressionable young daughters to Wright's hate speech on Sundays; and why he continued to call Wright his pastor and defend him and retain him in an official campaign role right up until last week when Wright's own words finally appeared on national television.
And Obama probably can't give an acceptable answer to those questions. His long embrace of Wright must have either been born in fecklessness, or in reckless ambition. Either he didn't think hard enough about whom he was associating with, or he joined Wright's church, consequences be damned, in order to procure himself a political base in a community, which, apart from the coincidence of skin color, was completely foreign to his Kansan-Kenyan heritage. And either way, Obama's long association with Wright and his equivocation about the matter undermines his claims that he has the judgment to lead the nation, that he brings a "new kind of politics" and that he is some sort of post-racial uniter.
Yes, the speech was a watershed in American history and in Obama's own trajectory. It will be remembered as the third nail in Obama's undoing -- (the first being his Princeton-Harvard-educated wife's statement that she was finally proud of America for the first time in her adult life; the second being the first televising of Wright speaking). If Obama loses the campaign for the White House, he lost it with this speech. And should he win, his presidency is already crippled. While he may always have the strong support of his base, including many in the liberal media, he has proven himself incapable of being a uniter. He would be the most divisive, despised, disrespected and ultimately least successful President this nation has ever had.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at March 20, 2008 10:51 AM | Email This