Yapping like little dogs about Jeremiah Wright's outrageous comments and then nibbling away at Obama's speech without addressing the whole speech. When people get paid for talking and writing they must find something to write and talk about - even if they fail to say anything.
For all the jawing over Reverend Wright's comments on white America, no one I have read or heard addressed whether the Reverend's fear and anger was in any way justified by how the white majority has treated its African-American minorities.
For all the playing of Reverend Wright's soundbites, no one has come forward to say these were typical of every Sunday sermon.
The only person I have heard address the issue of whether Reverend Wright's anger was justified is Obama himself.
From what I know of some African-Americans, they do have a mistrust of whites - a mistrust that makes them fearful of white intentions towards them. Whites have the same the fears. Nothing I have heard Senator Obama speak of does not accurately describe the race relations I know about.
The Washington Post published Obama, Trying to Bridge America's Racial Divide. It has access to video of the speech.
"But there was Barack Obama in Philadelphia yesterday, flanked by American flags, wading into the charged subject of race, which has divided Americans since the country was founded. He sounded, at times, like a skilled seamstress with a needle and a piece of thread, trying to carefully stitch together both a deeper portrait of himself and the nation's racial chasms amid a tight presidential contest."
***But his speech also acknowledged the racial resentments of working-class and middle-income whites -- resentments, he said, that have been stoked by talk show hosts and conservative commentators and manipulated for electoral gain. "This is where we are right now," Obama said. "It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years."
Getting out of that stalemate, he said, requires Americans to see one another as connected to a common purpose and to no longer "tackle race only as a spectacle" -- the O.J. Simpson trial, Hurricane Katrina, the comments of a Geraldine Ferraro or a Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Even more annoying to me was the double standard applied to Reverend Wright by the Conservatives and Republicans. For an example this paragraph from Michael Gerson's column in The Washington Post, A Speech That Fell Short.
It was not that Republicans accepted the support of Falwell (and Pat Robertson), but that they sought the support like supplicants. That the religious right withheld support from McCain after he criticized them until he kow-towed to them last year. Financial support? Er, what about those faith-based initiatives? Still, more importantly than money and unlike Reverend Wright's relationship with Obama, the Republicans gave power to a whole group of religious leaders that I can only call nuts. (Do remember Pat Robertson blamed gay men for AIDS, and the 9/11 attacks were a result of our sinfulness, and support for Israel will help pave the way for the Second Coming)."Yet didn't George Bush and other Republican politicians accept the support of Jerry Falwell, who spouted hate of his own? Yes, but they didn't financially support his ministry and sit directly under his teaching for decades."
I was rather proud of us white men when South Carolinians started voting for Obama. Maybe it was a sexist thing but it could have been so easy to dismiss Obama on racial grounds. That Obama has taken a hit is without doubt. The following is from the United Kingdom's Guardian newspaper Obama struggles to limit damage in pastor row as white voters slip away:
Listen for a few minutes to Joey Vento, owner of a south Philadelphia institution that serves gut-busting sandwiches through a takeaway hatch, and the scale of Barack Obama's problems become apparent. Obama is having the worst week of his campaign. It is, some believe, a week that threatens his chances of becoming president.
"That minister, that was terrible, all his sayings. He's preaching hatred," Vento said. "The thing I didn't like about Obama; you're telling me for 20 years you been going to that church and you never heard that?"
***Obama attempted to defuse the escalating row with a speech on Tuesday in Philadelphia in which he spoke in detail about his relationship with Wright and race in the US. It was widely acknowledged as one of his best. He wrote it on Monday night after his wife, Michelle, and their children had gone to bed. Although acclaimed by the media and political activists, his speech has failed to win over voters such as Vento.
Obama has since redoubled his efforts. Usually reluctant to offer himself up for interview, he began touring media outlets and appeared twice on CNN, first on Wednesday night and then again on Thursday. His campaign team announced yesterday that Obama had received the endorsement of the former Democratic candidate Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico.
But the sight of Wright calling on his congregation to sing God Damn America instead of God Bless America is not one from which Americans are going to be diverted easily. A theme that emerges from the bars and diners of white Philadelphia is suspicion that Obama's failure to disown Wright and his presence in his church for almost two decade suggests that he himself is secretly resentful towards white people. A stray comment during an interview may have helped contribute to that suspicion when he referred to his grandmother, who had voiced her concern about being mugged by a black person, as a "typical white person".
You might want to read the comments to the article and also this from the same newspaper: Language lessons.***African-Americans in Philadelphia have been largely supportive of Obama's handling of the Wright row. George Brooks, a cook in the A1 Soul Food truck, parked on the street in front of the Temple University campus in north Philadelphia, said Wright's comments reflected the thinking of many African-Americans. "That's the way we think, as a people," said Brooks. "It may be a big thing to the white race, but you know, these things happened to us. All these things that he's talking about happened to us."
But what if those remarks make white people uncomfortable? "Just think, we've been uncomfortable all these years," Brooks replied.
Yeah, some of that Guardian article can stick in the craw. And I think that was Obama's point: there is a lot sticking in white and black craws and it is time past to get them unstuck. We, the people, have been played by those who do not want to solve the country's problems but want to use our problems to make their own, private profits.
E.J. Dionne wrote a very good piece called Another Angry Black Preacher.
These are realities that Obama has forced us to confront, and they are painful. Wright was operating within a long tradition of African American outrage, which is one reason Obama could not walk away from his old pastor in the name of political survival. Obama's personal closeness to Wright would have made such a move craven in any event.I'm a liberal, and I loathe the anti-American things Wright said precisely because I believe that the genius of our country is its capacity for self-correction. Progressivism and, yes, hope itself depend on a belief that personal conversion and social change are possible, that flawed human beings are capable of transcending their pasts and their failings.
Obama understands the anger of whites as well as the anger of blacks, but he's placed a bet on the other side of King's legacy that converted rage into the search for a beloved community. This does not prove that Obama deserves to be president. It does mean that he deserves to be judged on his own terms and not by the ravings of an angry preacher.
Maureen Dowd hit a bit of the same point in her column, Black, White & Gray.
He tried to shine a light on that clannish place where grudges and grievances flourish. After racing from race for a year, he plowed in and took a stab at showing blacks what white resentment felt like and whites what black resentment felt like.
(He was spot-on about my tribe of working-class Irish, the ones who have helped break his winning streak in New Hampshire and Ohio, and may do so in Pennsylvania.)
***The candidate may have staunched the bleeding, but he did not heal the wounds. His naïve and willful refusal to come to terms earlier with the Rev. Wright’s anti-American, anti-white and pro-Farrakhan sentiments — echoing his naïve and willful refusal to come to terms earlier with the ramifications of his friendship with sleazy fund-raiser Tony Rezko — will not be forgotten because of one unforgettable speech.
But then, the most intriguing thing about the speech in the National Constitution Center here, near the statues of the founding fathers who signed the document declaring that “all men are created equal,” was not even the part about black and white. It was the new color that Obama unexpectedly wore: gray.
The black and white plaguing the Obama camp was not only about skin color. Facing up to his dubious behavior toward his explosive friends, he had his first rude introduction in his political career to ambivalence, ambiguity and complexity.
Thinking one speech will kill off this subject is foolishness. If only a speech would have killed off the problem of race in this country, then would have happened long before Obama spoke this week. All Obama's speech gave us was the opportunity for a conversation without the cant and humbugger> that comes from both sides of that color line.
And do take a good look at how Obama handled this whole affair. He did not hunker down in his mind and radiate prickly anger at the press - as would have our current President. He did not pander to the anger of African-Americans. He did not wrap the issue in so much double talk and meaningless phrases that left us feeling good until we realized that nothing was said - which is normal politician-speak. He treated the American people with the dignity of being adults who can think, whose opinions are important, and who deserve honesty instead of manipulation.
I disagree with Mr. Dionne on a point. I think how Obama handled this problem serves as evidence as how he will approach difficult problems. With evidence like this, I do think he deserves to be president.
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