Saturday, March 22, 2008

Notes on the Obama speech

I watched Barack Obama's Reverend Wright speech on Tuesday and was immediately convinced it was a failure. Of course, I'm not a very good focus group for the Senator, especially on this issue. As I said last week, how do you explain such bigotry and America-hatred? You can't. So I went into the speech convinced that there was no explaining a close, twenty-year relationship with a man such as Jeremiah Wright.

But Obama's speech made things worse, from my perspective. The thrust of the speech turned out not to be about his relationship with Wright, but on race relations in general. He switched the focus from himself onto the rest of us; he had no explaining to do, we did. The subtle, unspoken message was that he was not guilty, we were. If we couldn't understand what went on each Sunday in Wright's church, or similar churches, it was due to a lack of imagination and understanding on our part. Wright, given the era he had come of age, was justified in his rage - oh, perhaps he went too far sometimes, but who was he to judge? In Obama's eyes, Wright's racist rants were no different than his white grandmother's reservations about passing young black men in the street. Or Geraldine Ferraro's unremarkable comment that Obama is in the position he's in because of his race. That comment may not be perfectly true - Obama has obvious talents that are certainly in part responsible for his success. However, without his racial makeup those other talents would not be enough to propel him to the brink of the Democratic party nomination as a post-racial candidate. So while Ferraro's comment probably needs some slight amendment, it is still innocuous. Does Obama truly believe it comparable to Wright's "God Damn America!" comment? Or his accusation that the United States government created the AIDS virus in order to destroy blacks? I don't think he does but the fact that his explanation fell back on moral relativism - it is a virus among the left and has been for fifty years - is more evidence that his mind-set is saturated with the orthodoxies of leftism.

One more comment. The speech is already famously known as the "throw your grandma under the bus" speech. It has been duly noted that denigrating the woman who helped raise you (and who is still alive) during a speech is unchivalrous at best, and more likely a sign of low character. I agree. It is appalling in retrospect - casting someone close to you in a bad light in order to score political points. When he said it during the speech, I reflected back to Al Gore using his sister's death from cancer for political benefit. During that same campaign he also used his son's car accident to gin up sympathy and to prove to voters he had a heart. It was truly grubby behavior but at least Gore wasn't actually criticizing those relatives he spoke of. Obama, with forethought, actually found it acceptable to commit his grandmother to history and public opinion as a mild bigot. The more I think of it, the more astonishing I find it.

But I may have my own explanation for it. Did Obama not even realize he was criticizing grandma? Just as he didn't realize that Wright's lunatic sermons were not particularly controversial? He said he wasn't criticizing grandma - that she is simply a "typical white person." His speech let it be known that he thinks Wright is a typical black person of his era. So the question is, is no behavior unacceptable? Can justifications be found for everything? And do we want a president who thinks like this? Do we want a president who, after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declares the Holocaust a myth and calls for Israel to be wiped off the map, is still eager to sit down and negotiate with Iran? Does Obama think Ahmadinejad just went a little too far in his rhetoric, like Wright? This whole Wright episode, the speech, and its aftermath, have convinced me even further that Barack Obama is unfit for the presidency.

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