"I can no more disown him [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown my white grandmother."
-- Barack Obama, Philadelphia, March 18
Guess it's time to disown Granny, if Obama's famous Philadelphia "race" speech is to be believed. Of course, the speech was not just believed. It was hailed, celebrated, canonized as the greatest pronouncement on race in America since Lincoln at Cooper Union. A New York Times columnist said it "should be required reading in classrooms across the country." College seniors and first-graders, suggested the excitable Chris Matthews.
Apparently there's been a curriculum change. On Tuesday, the good senator begged to extend and revise his previous remarks on race. Moral equivalence between Grandma and Wright is now, as the Nixon administration used to say, inoperative. Poor Geraldine Ferraro, thrice lashed by Obama in Philadelphia as the white equivalent of Wright's raving racism, is off the hook.
These equivalences having been revealed as the cheap rhetorical tricks they always were, Obama has now decided that the man he simply could not banish because he had become part of Obama himself is, mirabile dictu, surgically excised.
At a news conference in North Carolina, Obama explained why he finally decided to do the deed. Apparently, Wright's latest comments -- Obama cited three in particular -- were so shockingly "divisive and destructive" that he had to renounce the man, not just the words.
What were Obama's three citations? Wright's claim that AIDS was invented by the U.S. government to commit genocide. His praise of Louis Farrakhan as a great man. And his blaming Sept. 11 on American "terrorism."
But these comments are not new. These were precisely the outrages that prompted the initial furor when the Wright tapes emerged seven weeks ago. Obama decided to cut off Wright not because Wright's words or character or views had suddenly changed. The only thing that changed was the venue in which Wright chose to display them -- live on national TV at the National Press Club. That unfortunate choice destroyed Obama's Philadelphia pretense that this "endless loop" of sermon excerpts being shown on "television sets and YouTube" had been taken out of context.
I was never a fan of the Philadelphia speech, which I termed "craven" two days after the fact. It's inadequacies were obvious (if one was interested in looking for them), and it isn't surprising, to myself at least, that it was exactly this attempt to "contextualize" Wright that would fail so miserably. As I said back in March:
Way too much time and energy was spent giving excuses for Wright's hate. There is no context which could make it understandable or excusable. In this Obama is hardly alone, as it a common weakness inherent in the liberal Democratic penchant for victimhood. The truth is hate is hate regardless of context. Imagine a Republican candidate who had an active member of the KKK as a "spiritual advisor". Now, do you think anyone would listen for a second to attempts to "contextualize" that person's views? Of course not, and nor should they.
It's a month and a half later and none of that has changed.
What has changed is the way the American people are viewing Obama in the light of this debacle. 58% Say Obama Denounced Wright for Political Convenience, not Outrage
A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 30% of the nation’s Likely Voters believe Barack Obama denounced his former Pastor, Jeremiah Wright, because he was outraged. Most—58%--say he denounced the Pastor for political convenience. The survey was conducted on Wednesday and Thursday night. Obama made his statements about Wright on Tuesday.
Wright held a mini-media tour last weekend capped by a press conference at the National Press Club on Monday. Only 33% of voters believe that Obama was surprised by the views Wright expressed at Monday’s press conference. Fifty-two percent (52%) say he was not surprised.
Of course not! If the average voter isn't surprised that Wright actually holds the opinions he's been spouting for years, how can Obama claim to be surprised?
Fundamentally, Obama was trying to sell us all on the idea it was all a matter of inflection. I'm sorry but when it comes to "God damn America" and "the US government created AIDS to kill blacks" it is most assuredly a matter of what Wright said, not how he said it. Obama must have the political tin ear to beat all tin ears to have believed otherwise.
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