Talk about signs of the Apocalypse, when Charles Murray, the bigot who wrote The Bell Curve, posted on the Corner Blog of the National Review, a Magazine that never failed out to speak out in favor of bigotry and racist policies until it was too late to make a difference, just described Barack Obama’s speech as, “just plain flat out brilliant”.
You know, if I was hoping for the Rapture, I’d be looking this as a bigger sign than anything happening in Israel.
Down at TPM Cafe, FlyOnTneWall has a very interesting post on the realities of Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., the pastor at Obama’s Church.
Specifically, he discusses the Fox News (who else) coverage of a rather incendiary sermon in which he makes it clear that he supports Obama.
Ostensibly, the article is about the potential implications with the IRS, but in reality Fox uses it get some potentially disastrous sound bites on the table.
In addition to the use of the N-Word, and describing Bill Clinton as having done the Black community, “just like he did Monica”, which I think that Obama can, and did defuse with his “crazy uncle” disavowal, there are some statements that are far more troubling from a political perspective:
Brian Ross’s report for Good Morning America on Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, is potentially a huge problem for Obama. In the piece, Ross has clips of Wright delivering sermons in which he says we should not say God Bless America, but God “Damn” America, in which he calls America the US of KKKA (referring to how racist the country is), and in which he says about September 11 that America’s “chickens have come home to roost.”
From a purely tactical perspective, he needs to get ahead of this story, and he needs to do so in the next few days.
If he waits until Monday, it may well be too late.
It is necessarily a painful thing, after all, Rev. Wright’s has been his pastor for over 20 years, but these are the sound bites that will be used to destroy his campaign.
Rev. Wright is not Louis Farrakhan, but the political reality in the US in 2008 is that he will have to be disavowed and denounced in the same manner, and even then you will still see his clips all over Fox News.
He needs not to repeat Clinton’s weakness with Ferraro.
The Republicans are salivating at the opportunity to turn Obama into the scary angry black man. It’s not fair, it’s just the way it is.
They need to throw Wright off the bus, and back up over him, and do it again, and then tie an anchor to him and throw him in the river.
Let me make this clear, Richard Cohen’s proposed “Farrahkan Test” is stupid and racist.
The idea that Obama some signs off on an editorial decision made by the daughter of his pastor is insane.
Henry at Crooked Timber, in his post, Six degrees of Louis Farrakhan, makes the following point:
There’s something else going on here. I strongly suspect that Barack Obama is being asked to condemn Louis Farrakhan not because there’s some bogus two-degrees-of-separation thing going on, but because Barack Obama is black, and because black politicians are supposed to condemn Louis Farrakhan before they can be trusted. This isn’t racism, but it’s an implicit double standard, under which black politicians have a higher hurdle to jump before they deserve public trust than white ones. More generally, this is a bad, wrongheaded, and even dangerous article. Richard Cohen shouldn’t have written it, and the Washington Post shouldn’t have printed it.
I will go further. This is explicitly, and intentionally racist.
BTW, Obama’s response, as given to Talking Points Memo is as follows:
I decry racism and anti-Semitism in every form and strongly condemn the anti-Semitic statements made by Minister Farrakhan. I assume that Trumpet Magazine made its own decision to honor Farrakhan based on his efforts to rehabilitate ex-offenders, but it is not a decision with which I agree.
Richard Cohen is a shanda before the goyim, and a miserable excuse for a human being.
This explains why he works writing openions for the Washington Post.
The dynamic of the back and forth between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is interesting, and I think that Hillary had the better of the exchange, which, according to sources in both campaigns is now officially over.
Obama’s campaign is designed around a goal, to prevent the voting public from thinking of him as an angry black man who cries “wolf” about racism.
As Ezra Klein and John Aravosis have said, this exchange undercuts Obama’s primary message, that he is a new kind of politician who can bring people together, because people are hearing what they see as the same old tired litany (it’s not really tired, because we are a bigoted society) of accusations of racism.
It also gives Charlie Rangel, whose civil rights cred is unassailable, an opportunity to call Obama’s comments stupid.
BTW, if these little digs are causing a hiccup in Obama’s campaign, just wait and see what would happen if he gets the nomination.
Republicans will take those accusations of racism as a badge of honor, and they will, as they have in the past, run a campaign of racist code words.
I fear that Obama would be dead meat in the general.
Interesting analysis from Open Left, Chris Bowers notes that Obama led 38%-39% among those dissatisfied with Bush, but among the 2/3 of the voters angry with Bush, Clinton won 39%-34%.
Obama is in a bind with this. His campaign is deliberately a non-angry one, and he really can’t switch gears, because if he does, he becomes the “angry black man”, and that is not an electable place to be in the USA.
Fascinating. It’s clear that he is criticizing Obama with this statement:
Yet the Democratic candidates — with the exception of John Edwards, who opened his campaign in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward and has made addressing poverty central to his campaign — have virtually ignored the plight of African Americans in this country. The catastrophic crisis that engulfs the African-American community goes without mention. No urban agenda is given priority. When thousands of African Americans marched in protest in Jena, La., not one candidate showed up.
Truth be told, I agree.
Among the serious candidates*, only Edwards is talking to issues of inequality and poverty.
In fact, Obama’s basic message, one of “bipartisan civility” pretty much excludes any discussion of the divide between the haves or have nots, because such a discussion would inevitably lead to people saying nasty things to each other.
This is why we do not need a conciliator in chief.
*Which excludes Kucinich.