Where Wright Was Wrong And Obama Was (Almost) Right (Even Though He's Left)

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Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike that Barack Obama's March 18 speech, A More Perfect Union, is the greatest bit of rhetoric ever to be uttered since the Sermon on the Mount...at least according to the mainstream media. To those of us in the real world of course, this is nonsense. The speech was, first and foremost, a political necessity, a way to stop the immediate, alarming and potentially fatal slump in Obama's poll numbers in the wake of the revelation of Jeremiah Wright's, Obama's pastor and close friend of many years' hate-filled videos. As such, it had to walk a fine line, sounding credible to all sides and not alienating either African-Americans (including those of Wright's paranoid mindset) and Whites, who are ready to vote for an African-American, as long as he won't don a Dashiki and deliver an address titled Payback Time at his Inaugaral. Any speech with such broad goals is bound to have some bits that are going to please any group, even conservatives who are skeptical of Obama's Leftism. And so it did.

Among best parts of the speech, from a conservative perspective are the following lines:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he
spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

Unfortunately, immediately thereafter he starts to go wobbly:

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means
acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed.

It is in "acknowledging that what ails the African-American community" that he starts to head into the tall grass of the Left. What ails the African-American community at this point isn't racism and the lingering effects Obama sees, ingrained societal attitudes and policies that are keeping Blacks down, but the belief that this is true as well as those who profit from that belief. It is understandable that after generations of slavery and Jim Crowe, Blacks should have incorporated victimhood as part of their identify. But that paradigm is now false and clinging to it no longer serves a positive purpose. Instead it is perpetuating the problem.

While not denying that racism exists in the form that the Al Shartons, the Jesse Jacksons. the Jeremiah Wrights and the Democratic Party say that it does, the reality is that it exists to a much smaller degree than they would have us believe. And the evidence of that is everywhere for those willing to see it.

One of the best ways to view how people feel about each other is to see how they interact on an intimate level and one of the best ways to do that in this situation is to look at Black/White intermarriage. In the '40's and '50's only about 2% of Black men married White women, the societal taboo against such a thing being very strong. By the 80's and 90's that percentage had risen to about 10%.

Also, economically the disparity between the races is not nearly as profound as many would have it appear. Thomas Sowell, one of the truly great intellects of our time and a man who fearlessly confronts the lies of the zeitgeist daily, frequently addresses this issue head-on in both his column and in many of his books. Those who have a vested interest in continued racial discord often point to the disparity in household incomes between Blacks and Whites. Sowell has pointed out that the problem with this comparison is that it doesn't take into account that fact that Black households comprise a far higher percentage of single mothers, a much poorer income group among both Blacks and Whites. He also points out in this example, that a Census Bureau study of a few years ago,

"... with dozens of pages lavished on income disparities, mentions in one brief sentence that the real per capita income of whites rose 13 percent from 1989 to 1999, while the real per capita income of Blacks rose 24 percent during that same period."

Maybe the most startling statistic that militates against racism being responsible for economic hardship is the fact that immigrants from Barbados, almost exclusively Black, have higher incomes than Whites.

The fact is that today most of the disparities between African-Americans and Whites is caused cultural factors, and by that I specifically mean the retention of a debilitating belief system that says that Blacks can't get ahead because of White racism. It isn't true but what is true is that such a self defeating world view can be self-fulfilling. Which is just what both racial con men like Jeremiah Wright and the Democratic Party need for their own purposes. An excited and inflamed audience keeps the pews full for Wright and a large, aggrieved constituency is needed by the Democrats whose only hold on power is through the manipulation of identity politics.

If Barack Obama had really wanted to make the greatest speech this side of the divinely inspired he might have tried really speaking "truth to power" and said some of the above. But his objective here wasn't nearly so lofty. He was really just trying to get himself out of a jam and despite the media's fawning reception, he went only as far as was necessary to do just that and no more. Thanks to the media he may just have succeeded in his limited goal, but the opportunity that existed to do so much more, sadly went unfulfilled.

Cross-linked at Liberty Pundit

Bye Bye Obama?

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Less than a month ago the media was still in mid-swoon over Senator Barack Obama, as he got massive coverage which was massively positive. But this past week the tide may finally have begun to turn. Over the past few days Obama's close connection to his "former" pastor, Jeremiah Wright, has come under increased scrutiny as video like the above has been uncovered raising a host of questions. Did Wright preach the sort of hate exemplified in the video in front of Obama? If he did, what did Obama think? Say? Do?


Despite all the positive press Obama has gotten the Wright controversy is not the first time troubling questions have been raised about him. Obama’s attempt to portray himself as a new kind of politician, almost beyond politics has been hampered by a number of facts that don’t square with this image.


Obama’s claim that he represents change becomes considerably harder to sell in light of the fact that the National Journal found him to be the most liberal Senator; more liberal than Kennedy, Kerry, Reid or even Clinton. All the talk about change becomes considerably harder to believe when every plan you advocate has been advocated by Ted Kennedy for the past forty years.


His relationship with Antoin (Tony) Rezko is troubling on another level. When you’re trying to prove that you’re above politics having murky financial dealings with an indicted potential felon are not helpful. Tony Rezko is a real estate developer and has been a friend of Obama’s for over twenty years who is now on trial for extortion. While Obama is not implicated in Rezko’s charges, eyebrows have been raised by a real estate deal in which Obama bought his house, after consultation with Rezko for what appears to be an unusually low price, while on the same day Rezko’s wife bought a lot adjoining Obama’s for $625,000, selling a portion of it to Obama a few months later for (yet another low price) $104,500. Nothing illegal has been charged in the deal but it has the smell of a thousand other buddy/buddy, wink-and-a-nudge deals indulged in by so many other completely conventional politicians who are seen as slimy by the public.


Some of the glow of Obama’s newness was also removed by Hillary Clinton's commercial pointing out Obama’s possible lack of preparedness in facing the by now expected “Are you prepared for a crisis at 3 AM” question. The commercial was effective not because it is obvious that Obama isn’t prepared, it is damaging to Obama because people just don’t know if he is prepared. And the commercial may have given enough people pause that it helped Hillary to have a good day in the Super Tuesday II primaries, preventing Obama from landing a knockout blow.


But the Wright problem may well prove to be when all the questions about Obama reach a critical mass. The difference between the Jesse Jackson campaign of 1984 and one of the predicates for the success of the Obama campaign has been Obama's ability to appear to be beyond race. But the Wright issue could well start to peel the bark off that appearance. Wright’s videoed comments aren’t just about Black empowerment; they talk about the US being behind a plot to introduce AIDS into the Black community for the purpose of genocide. They accuse Israel of carrying out a genocidal policy against the Palestinians. They blame the US for 9/11 and even for the attack on Pearl Harbor! His beliefs place him comfortably in the fever swamps of the lunatic fringe. Jeremiah Wright appears to hate the US. Is it really credible that a man whose feelings about this country are so strong never talked to his close friend, Barack Obama about those feelings even after Obama was running for and winning a Senate in that evil entity, the US? When Obama is running for the Presidency of that same “criminal” nation? Wright runs the risk of removing Obama from the mainstream, potentially stripping him of his “trans-racial” appeal.


Barack Obama now has a significant advantage in delegates to the Democratic convention in August. In order to prevail the percentage of delegates Hillary needs to win in order to gain the nomination may be higher than she can reasonably be expected to achieve. Barack Obama, despite all of the above questions about him, is still the odds-on favorite to win the nomination. Perhaps neither he or Hillary will have enough delegates to win on the first ballot at the convention at which point it may come down to a battle for the so-called Super Delegates, delegates who aren’t committed to any candidate by virtue of vote count, but who can decide on their own where to go. It could get ugly.


Should he survive all that Obama will then enter the general election, not quite the trans-racial, squeaky clean, brand new, agent of change he has tried to sell himself as being. What he and we can count on is that once he enters the general election those questions are not going to go away. The Republicans are not in a very strong position in this upcoming election and they know it. They are not likely to let these questions about Obama drop. Why should they; especially since they didn’t even have to go hunting for them on their own? They have had them handed to them by Clinton and Obama themselves.

Things Fall Apart - How McCain Can Still Lose The Republican Nomination

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Super Tuesday has come and gone and the smoke has cleared leaving the landscape clear, with only one man left standing with any chance, mathematically, of gaining the Republican nomination: John McCain.Mitt Romney has bowed to reality; and with his grace and good sense in doing so spared the Party a now pointless competition. Mike Huckabee, of course, is still in but his candidacy is now more clearly seen for what it has always been, a route to the vice-presidency, not the presidency. Oh yes, Ron Paul is still in as well, acting as he has from the start, as a sort of political poultice, drawing out the poisons (conspiracy theorists and other whackos) in the Party.

McCain is now the presumptive nominee, the establishment is lining up behind him and the Democrats have already crafted a playbook on how to handle him in the general election. The Straight-Talk Express has now reached critical mass. But maybe not.

In all likelihood McCain will be the Republican nominee, but in politics, as in life in general, it ain’t over ‘til it’s over. And there are some troubling signs on the road ahead for the McCain candidacy. The Republicans start this election season off with a number of distinct disadvantages; attempting to follow an unpopular Republican president completing his second term; the memory of a corrupt, profligate Republican Congress that was swept from power only two short years ago, still fresh; a newly energized Democratic Party that is almost psychotic in its lust to get back into the Oval Office and, most damaging to the now apparent nominee, a candidate whom a large part of the Republican conservative base (and this is no exaggeration) loathes.

Due to the front-loading of this year’s primaries John McCain has wrapped up the nomination earlier than any other nominee in modern times. While this affords some opportunities, such as giving him time to assemble his general election policies and team, it also presents some possibly fatal difficulties as well. As stated earlier, the Democrats have more time to assemble their strategies for taking McCain apart and while McCain has always been the mainstream media’s favorite Republican, in a general election, against a Democrat the msm is going to go after him with the same vigor they do any Republican. And where a Republican would normally have the support of the so-called “alternative media” i.e. talk radio, the conservative blog-o-sphere etc., McCain’s years of treating the base with contempt has left it dispirited and frequently antagonistic to him.

Taking all of the above into consideration, the following scenario now becomes possible: With eight months to go before the Republican convention McCain, lacking an energized base and under constant assault in the press performs abysmally in national head-to-head polls with either of the two likely Democratic candidates and come September it is obvious that McCain is such a damaged and flawed candidate that it will be impossible for him to win the general election. The Party, in a desperate attempt to save themselves from a disaster of historic dimensions, does what it did when the writing was on the wall for Richard Nixon: they send a group of respected Republican emissaries to inform him that he must go. McCain, the bottom having dropped out of his campaign steps aside “for the good of my party and my country” and releases his delegates, thereby throwing the convention wide open.

Now this scenario is far more likely to occur if it becomes clear fairly soon that Barak Obama will be the Democratic nominee. Hillary Clinton is so flawed as a candidate herself that polling is likely to show a fairly close race between her and McCain. But if Obama becomes the presumptive nominee within the next month or two, the enthusiasm of the Democratic base coupled with a press-in-love with him promises to reveal poll after poll of a Republican Armageddon.

Should this scenario play out, who would inherit the Republican nod? Mitt, perhaps? Fred Thompson? Someone who hasn’t been in the field yet at all perhaps. That would certainly make for an exciting convention and perhaps even set up the possibility of a Republican win.

Is any of the above likely? Not terribly but in this unusual political season which has been filled with the unexpected, I wouldn’t rule anything out just yet.

The Winter Of Our Discontent

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While the results of Super Tuesday were not conclusive in that they did not secure the Republican nomination with certainty for any one candidate the trend lines were drawn more strongly and what had before been a likelihood now inches closer to a certainty. Barring some major shift (and this primary season has been filled with them, so anything remains possible) in the first week of September the Republican party will nominate Senator John McCain as its candidate for president. It is hard to imagine a way he can win the general election.

McCain has spent a career antagonizing the Republican base and despite his walking away from Super Tuesday in the catbird's seat the numbers show the trouble to come. Only three in ten conservative votes on Super Tuesday went to McCain. Talk radio, reflecting the dissatisfaction that small percentage represents, spends much of its time lately in full-blown attack mode against the Senator. The number of total Republican voters is dwarfed by the total number of Democrats:

Total votes cast in 21 GOP contests yesterday among McCain, Romney and Huckabee:
McCain: 43.1% (3,611,459)Romney: 35.4% (2,961,834)Huckabee: 21.5% (1,796,729)
For grand totals, vastly more Democrats than Republicans voted yesterday;
Democratic votes for Clinton and Obama: 14,622,822 (63.6%)Republican votes for McCain, Romney and Huckabee: 8,370,022 (36.4%)
Put another way, the Clinton/Obama race drew 76% more voters than the McCain/Romney/Huckabee race.

None of the Republican candidates is exciting Republican voters, certainly not the way Barak Obama and even Hillary Clinton is exciting the Democrats. That fact coupled with McCain's poor showing among conservatives says much about what November will bring for the Party of Lincoln and Reagan.

What to do, then? After the Republican Congress broke faith with the American people, handing over the House and Senate to the Democrats, with the sad spectacle of this nominating process and the coming debacle conservatives are left with one reasonable course of action: We need an extensive period of self-examination and a revival of the kind of energy and devotion to ideas that made the Reagan Administration so dynamic. We need to elect men and women of principle, the kind of men and women who are disgusted with what the Republican Congress had become and to whom the thought of the Gerald Ford/Bob Michel version of republicanism is anathema.

We will spend our time wandering in the desert but if we stick to our principles the future may still be even brighter than the past. Just remember the Republican nominee who followed Gerald Ford was Ronald Reagan.

2012 isn't really that far off. Let's use the time contructively.

Stunning!

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After having failed to win a single caucus or primary, Democratic presidential candidate former Senator John Edwards is scheduled to announce that he will be exiting the race for the presidency sometime today.

It is expected that his hair will be especially lustrous during today's announcement.

That is all.

The Greatest Man Who Can Never Get My Vote

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By now the story is well known: John Sidney McCain III, son and grandson of Admirals, while serving as a naval pilot during the Vietnam War was shot down over that country in 1967 and captured by the Viet Cong. Injured on impact he remained a prisoner for five years, two of them in solitary confinement. He was frequently tortured. In response to this torment he gave only his name, rank and serial number. The North Vietnamese, in an overt propaganda ploy offered to release POW McCain after his father was named Commander of the Pacific Command, the communists hoping to show that America cared only for the sons of privilege. John McCain refused, stating he would stay unless every man captured before him was released first. The North Vietnamese refused. Lieutenant McCain did not return home for another four years.

John McCain is the very definition of an American hero. I have voted in every presidential election for the past twenty two years and each time I have voted for the Republican candidate. John McCain, hero, is now running to be the next Republican nominee for President and if he achieves his goal it will be without my vote. I will not vote for John McCain for president. If John McCain becomes the Republican nominee, for the first time in twenty two years I will not cast a vote for president.

You see, unfortunately while Senator McCain has great personal courage and is a truly great man he also has terrible political judgment and is an absolutely awful Republican. Awful. John McCain claims to be a conservative but on issue after issue he has proven that he is not. Senator McCain's departures from conservative principles are almost as well known as Lieutenant Commander McCain's courage.

• On campaign finance reform he was the author of and chief cheerleader for the McCain/Feingold Act, the main effect of which is to limit the public's free speech during elections.
• When President George W. Bush passed his landmark tax cuts in 2001 McCain was one of only two Republican Senators to vote against it. As he campaigns for president today he says that he voted against these tax cuts because they weren't accompanied by spending cuts, but the record of the time shows this is not the case. He said at the time he was voting against the tax cuts because they favored the rich. This is rhetoric right out of the Democratic lexicon. And even if the claim were true it shows an astonishing lack of understanding about the proven track record of tax cuts: they raise revenue due to the increase in economic activity they stimulate. Tax cuts do not require spending cuts "to pay for them." They "pay" for themselves.
• He was the leader of the notorious "Gang of 14" Senators whose compromise on the filibustering of judicial nominees left open the door for more of the same in the future.
• Most notoriously Senator McCain worked hand in hand with Mr. Liberal himself, Senator Ted Kennedy to try to pass the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006, which was in effect the largest amnesty program in American history and whose effect would have been a massive increase in illegal immigration into the nation. It was only stopped by a tidal wave of protest from average Americans.

The list goes on and on, on issue after issue. And with each and every one of these very damaging and very un-conservative policies Senator McCain became more beloved by the blatantly liberal mainstream media, frequently being referred to in conservative circles as the New York Times' favorite Republican. At times it seems that McCain is ashamed to be a conservative and his attempt to cast himself as one is nothing more than a mask he feels he needs to wear so that he can capture the office he so desires.

Stubbornness can be a good quality in a president but when taken to an extreme it can also be a fatal flaw. John McCain does not like it when he doesn't get his way and his reputation for nastiness and condescension behind closed doors in the Senate is common Beltway talk. I will always remember when he lost the South Carolina primary to then Governor George W. Bush in 2000. He said that he believed some "dirty tricks" had been perpetrated against him by Bush. This belief was specious at best. His concession speech on that night was one of the most ungracious and most troubling political performances I have ever seen, filled as it was with rage and rancor. He looked like a man on the verge of losing control. On that night I knew that John McCain did not have the temperament to be president.

It is odd that a man who has so many of the qualities of greatness should have in equal measure, qualities that would make his ascension to the most powerful leadership role in the world a likely calamity.

I respect John McCain. I know that John McCain is a better man than I will ever be. And I will not vote for him for President. Senator John McCain is the greatest man who could never, will never get my vote.

Would/Would Not

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Back during the halcyon days of Ronald Reagan's presidency the question of what was or was not a conservative position was fairly easy to determine. Reagan, unlike the caricature constructed of him by an elitist, near monolithic press and a long-regnant Democratic party, was far from a shallow simpleton; in fact, in a very real sense he may have been the most prepared president in US history. Reagan had spent most of his life reading, writing, talking and thinking about how society is ordered, where it had failed and what principles were needed to be to be in place for a free and dynamic society to remain free and dynamic. The nascent conservative movement nurtured and grown by the likes of William F. Buckley, Whittaker Chambers, Barry Goldwater, William Rusher and all the others squabbled and debated their way to a generally consistent philosophy whose standard bearer Reagan became. It could be argued whether a certain position or policy was conservative or not but the answer could be found in the First Principles to which the (now established) Movement had pledged its fealty.

Well things have changed. After years of electoral success which saw opportunity shrivel into opportunism and a Republican Congress that, under the corrosive spell of Washington's many temptations seemed to morph more and more into that regnant Democratic party it had come to power to replace, what is and is not a conservative position has lost the clarity it once had.

So now we see a current Republican field of presidential candidates whose conservatism has left the public suspicious and dissatisfied. We have candidates who just a few short years ago held positions even they admit weren't conservative. We have candidates who seem very much commited to conservative principles on some issues but not at all on others, revealing a kind of ideological confusion we have all seen before to our dismay. And we have candidates whose sound-bites echo the worst impulses of Democratic demagogues. And we seem to have a Republican electorate that is as confused about the verities as politicians would like them to be.

This series of posts, "Would/Would Not" is going to attempt to answer some of the questions about what is and isn't conservative based on First Principles. It will be serious, it will be fun. It will raise the biggest issues and spend just as much time on the small. It will not attempt to be a Bible that demands anyone's loyalty, but hopefully a provocative discussion that might clear the thinking and blow away just the smallest bit of the fog that has floated in over the last few years, obscuring what had once been clear.

Coming soon: If Huckabee were guided by conservative principles he would...