Soccer Dad

The speech: part II

A month and a half ago Charles Krauthammer declared Sen. Obama's speech on race as a Brilliant Fraud, focusing on two aspects of the speech:

(a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there's Wright, but at the other "end of the spectrum" there's Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother, "who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage and poison others?

"I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was Grandma's offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus's time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did Grandma.

Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred?

(b) White guilt. Obama's purpose in the speech was to put Wright's outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. And by history, he means the history of white racism. Obama says, "We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country," and then he proceeds to do precisely that. What lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination? Jeremiah Wright, of course.

This contextual analysis of Wright's venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It's the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That's why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination.

Now in the Race speech revisited, (or here) Krauthammer revisits that column briefly and revisits his judgment of Sen. Obama in light of the Senator's change of heart regarding Rev. Wright this week:

On Tuesday, Obama declared that he himself was surprised at Wright's outrages. But hadn't Obama told us that surprise about Wright is a result of white ignorance of black churches brought on by America's history of segregated services? How then to explain Obama's own presumed ignorance? Surely he too was not sitting in those segregated white churches on those fateful Sundays when he conveniently missed all of Wright's racist rants.

Obama's turning surprise about Wright into something to be counted against whites-- one of the more clever devices in that shameful, brilliantly executed, 5,000-word intellectual fraud in Philadelphia -- now stands discredited by Obama's own admission of surprise. But Obama's liberal acolytes are not daunted. They were taken in by the first great statement on race: the Annunciation, the Chosen One comes to heal us in Philly. They now are taken in by the second: the Renunciation.

Krauthammer notes that the NYT declared itself satisfied with Sen. Obama's latest explanation.

This country needs a healthy and open discussion of race. Mr. Obama’s repudiation of Mr. Wright is part of that. His opponents also have a responsibility — to repudiate the race-baiting and make sure it stops.

Except that Sen. Obama's repudiation didn't come from the heart, it came from political necessity. It stretches credulity to believe that he was unaware of his pastor's views before last week. (In Philadelphia he was aware of them but explained them away.)

Or as Krauthammer responds:

On what grounds? This 20-year association with Wright calls into question everything about Obama: his truthfulness in his serially adjusted stories of what he knew and when he knew it; his judgment in choosing as his mentor, pastor and great friend a man he just now realizes is a purveyor of racial hatred; and the central premise of his campaign, that he is the bringer of a "new politics," rising above the old Washington ways of expediency. It's hard to think of an act more blatantly expedient than renouncing Wright when his show, once done from the press club instead of the pulpit, could no longer be "contextualized" as something whites could not understand and only Obama could explain in all its complexity.

There is an element that the NYT alludes to (as does E.J. Dionne - here or here)

Senator John McCain has continued to embrace a prominent white supporter, Pastor John Hagee, whose bigotry matches that of Mr. Wright. Mr. McCain has not tried hard enough to stop a race-baiting commercial — complete with video of Mr. Wright — that is being run against Mr. Obama in North Carolina.

(I fail to understand why the commercial is race baiting.)

The Times brings up Hagee. Dionne brings up Robertson and Falwell.

Let me trump all of this: Al Sharpton. If there is a more poisonous figure in our political system than Al Sharpton, I'm unaware of it. He libeled a prosecutor. He led antisemitic riots. A protester at a demonstration that he organized murdered seven people.

Someone like Al Sharpton should be relegated to the ash heap of our political system. Yet in 2000 and again in 2004, Sharpton addressed the Democratic national convention. The same people who defend Sen. Obama now, never expressed any misgivings about Sharpton's continued respectability.

Still that doesn't address the question: Why give McCain a break for Hagee and not Obama for Wright?

The answer has nothing to do with color, but with the closeness of the politician to the man of cloth. Sen. Obama claimed Rev. Wright as his mentor and spiritual adviser. That makes a huge difference.

You don't like McCain's embrace of Hagee: cite it as a reason not to vote for him. That's fair game. But McCain was never a member of Hagee's congregation. He didn't write a book with a title taken from one of Hagee's speeches.

It is the closeness of Sen. Obama to Rev. Wright that is the issue. But it's more than the closeness it's the admitted influence Rev. Wright had on the candidate. Had Sen. Obama rejected Rev. Wright's outrageous statements immediately and unequivocally, he might have been able to prevent these distractions. But waiting so long before giving the necessary but uncomfortable speech he gave this week has damaged his credibility on the topic. That and the feeling that the distance he has put between himself and Rev. Wright is more a function of political calculation than of heartfelt regret are why questions about Rev. Wright will follow Sen. Obama for the rest of the campaign season.

UPDATE: more at memeorandum.

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Posted by SoccerDad at May 2, 2008 08:12 AM | TrackBack