How Barack Failed to Get His Groove Back

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First came the days of videos of his pastor and admitted close friend of twenty years Jeremiah Wright shouting hateful anti-white and anti-American comments in a virtual loop on cable stations. Then came a distinct drop in his poll numbers and Barack Obama knew he had to do something to stop the bleeding, so today he delivered A More Perfect Union, the speech he hopes will do just that. We'll see.

The speech was very much like Obama himself and his campaign so far; filled with impressive and stirring rhetorical flourishes. And empty as the vacuum of space. He needed to distance himself from Wright, explain his relationship with him, make it plain that he understands what is in the heart of the average American and show that the image he has tried so diligently to create of himself being beyond race is not a sham, that he is the real deal, the man who can unite and "heal" the country. Unfortunately for him his occasional minor successes made his major failures that much more starkly obvious.

Of course he had to and did repudiate Wright's paranoia and conspiracy-theory lunacy. He's running for President, not trying out to be the next guest on the Art Bell radio show. And he had to and did disavow the overt racism. The average White person is about as likely to vote for the guy who wants to get Whitey as is the Black person likely to vote for the White guy who thinks that "darkie" needs to be put in his place. He rightly and smartly made the point that "progress has been made", that the country that Pastor Wright sees is not the country we live in today.

But in trying to explain why he joined Wright's church and why he stayed he spoke sweetly and explained nothing. He basically said that since his experience showed Wright to be a caring friend, a source of encouragement, that he has done good works; the fact that he also happens to have a hate-filled, racist, deranged streak can be forgiven. No, Barack, it can't. The country that Jeremiah Wright is so filled with rage about (and which he still thinks exists) is one where a man could tithe his pay, teach Sunday School, love his wife and children and also agitate for Blacks to sit in the back of the bus. Wright is what he hates. If any White politician were to accept such a person into his inner circle today that politician would be condemned and probably driven from office. He would deserve to be. Barack Obama would probably be leading the charge.

The greatest failure of the speech however is that it proves (and quite conclusively, too) that Obama is not the man who can bring people together the way he says he can. Those videos of a hate-filled Jeremiah Wright, a man of God whose calls for damnation for America have far greater resonance and deeper meaning than if spoken by some non-religious shouter, were not taken before Barack Obama met Wright. They had known each other for well over a decade when they were made. The shouts of approval from the congregation were issued by the congregation that Obama has belonged to as long as he's known Wright. These were and are his friends and neighbors. And in all that time Obama has not been able to convince them to move beyond their resentment and hate. Nowhere in the speech does he even talk about his having tried.

How then can this be the man to bring the nation together? One of Barack Obama's main campaign themes is that he is a man who will "reach across the aisle" to get things done. But the reality is, he's had the chance to do just that in the Senate and hasn't. Now he says that he is the man who will move people away from the old racial ways into a new and better day. Once again, he's had the opportunity on a small scale and (if he's even tried) he's failed. Should inaction and/or failure really be the ticket to the most powerful office in the world?

Cross-Posted 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.

What Goes Around...

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Former Congresswoman and first-ever female Vice Presidential Candidate Geraldine Ferraro resigned from Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign today after committing the equivalent of a mortal sin in the Democratic Party: she told the truth.

Ferraro caused this furor du jour when she said these immortal words, "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept." Barack Obama being a smart politician saw the opening and made the most of it saying that Ferraro's comments were " ... ridiculous. ... I think they were wrong-headed. I think they are not borne out by our history or by the facts."..."The notion that it is a great advantage to me, an African-American named Barack Obama, in pursuit of the presidency I think is not a view that has been commonly shared by the general public ... Divisions of race, gender, of region are precisely what has inhibited us from moving effectively forward to solve big problems like health care, energy, the war on terror."

There it was. Ferraro had obviously played the race card, thereby cutting off all further discussion. She lost. Obama won. And the game that liberals have been playing for years to trap conservatives was now being used to collect other liberal scalps instead. They have begun to eat their own. Conservatives, usually the object of this dishonest nonsense can't be blamed for looking on in bemusement.

The Democratic Party and identity politics, the politics of appealing to self-identified aggrieved groups, have been synonymous since the early sixties. Numerous groups, Blacks, Gays, Women, etc. point to a variety of areas in which they have been oppressed and Democratic politicians agree, flatter them, and then attempt to legislate or adjudicate, or regulate the inequities away. This partnership has, in many ways, been highly successful for both the Party and the groups. Democrats have had a ready made campaign weapon and tool and a rationale for expanding government power, "I'm here to fix the unfairness to which you have been subjected. Vote for me against the powerful forces putting you down. I'll give you money and programs." And the groups have received policies, laws, programs etc. that address their "special needs". Affirmative Action and quotas, various monetary set-asides, the edifice of multiculturalism: sensitivity trainings, bilingualism, various speech codes, etc. are all the result of the partnership. The effectiveness of all this largess in improving people's lives frequently seems besides the point.

The incipient problem lurking within the union of the Democratic Party and its constituent groups has always been that in breaking people into such distinct factions, all with their own unique power centers, the day would come when the interests of some would diverge significantly enough from the others or the Party that war would break out. Geraldine Ferraro seems, much to her chagrin no doubt, to have gotten caught in the crossfire.

This election doesn't just pit the first woman with a real chance of getting the nomination against the first African American, it pits the entrenched power structure of the Party, as represented by Hillary Clinton against against a newcomer, Senator Obama. The Party, which has become so certain of Black loyalty that it frequently gives Blacks little more than lip service is now at a crossroads. African-Americans are saying to the party that has promised them so much and to which they have been utterly loyal, "We have toed the line for decades. We now have a great candidate with a great message and a real chance to win. Our time has come." In response the Clinton campaign has done its level best to remind the country that Barack Obama is, you know ... a NEGRO. Bill Clinton, who had once been touted as the first Black President, did his level best before the South Carolina primary to link Obama's campaign to the earlier very ethno-centric Jesse Jackson presidential run. There isn't much talk about him being the first Black President any more.

The problem with identity politics isn't that it precludes obvious, noxious winks to racism like Clinton's but that it removes honest discussion about race, sexuality, gender issues, as well. Everybody becomes scared to death to touch the issue for fear of being called a racist or a sexist or a homophobe. Without identity politics Geraldine Ferraro would have been able to make her comment about Obama. Others could have quite rightly pointed out that while true, her assertion was too narrow. Obama wouldn't be where he is if he weren't Black. But he also wouldn't be there if he were bright, a good campaigner, a good debater etc. But in the current atmosphere, created and fostered by the Democratic Party as well as the "aggrieved" groups, Ferraro's comment was enough to result in her leaving Hillary's campaign.

This Democratic Party war, between its regnant structure and one of its most important constituent groups is unlikely to end anytime before the Democratic convention in August. In fact it is very likely to last well beyond that. Wounds have been opened. Minds are changing. Perhaps the end result of this whole battle will be the end of identity politics. If the Democratic Party finds it no longer works for it, this type of politics may finally die a well deserved death.

Having played this game for a long time it looks like the Democratic Party is finally learning the truth of that old saying: what goes around comes around. It couldn't happen to a more deserving party.