RE: Barack Obama: Judgment to Wait Twenty Years
June 1st, 2008 at 04:00am Geoff
As an addendum to Matt’s previous post, it was only a scant few months ago that Sen. Obama declared in his keynote speech on race that he could no more denounce Rev. Wright or Trinity United than he could his own grandmother, who apparently made some racially insensitive remarks during his childhood. It was the passage of a mere couple of weeks before Sen. Obama then did what he had just said he could not do and denounced Rev. Wright. After the passage of a few more weeks still he contradicted the aforementioned remarks again by announcing that he has left Trinity because of a “cultural and stylistic gap” that either didn’t exist during his now concluded twenty year membership or that he only recently discovered.
Neither of those excuses fly of course, and unless he is willing to admit that he never paid attention in church because he was surreptitiously listening to Chicago Bears games on a personal radio the entire time the self-evident conclusion to be made is that the variable that has induced Sen. Obama to foreswear his pastor and church is not a change in what they stood for but a change in his own political self-interest. To advance in the political environment of Chicago Sen. Obama needed Trinity and Rev. Wright and used them to his ever-increasing benefit, culminating in a seat in the United States Senate representing the State of Illinois. However now that he is seeking the presidency of the United States of America Trinity and Rev. Wright—and their racist, anti-American, repugnant views—are no longer a benefit but a potentially crippling liability to him, so out the window they go.
Voters should take note of this, for it ill-befits and ultimately betrays the new type of politics Sen. Obama portrays himself as a harbinger and paragon of. Indeed it is characteristic of the base opportunistic and unprincipled brand of politics we are all tired of, Republicans and Democrats alike. As Peter Wehner ably sums up:
What Obama did today may have been politically necessary. It was certainly politically expedient. And it is yet one more blow to Obama’s image as a different kind of politician. In fact, as we’ve learned over the last few months, Obama appears to be a Chicago politician through and through. When he perceived a threat to his self-interest, he cut his ties to first his pastor and then his church, both of which he had expressed familial love and fidelity. This whole episode is deeply unattractive, even as it is deeply revealing.
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1 Comment
1. KMorrison | June 2nd, 2008 at 9:50 am
The media has really been pathetic in covering this story. When he was asked by a reporter the other day how he would go about choosing a new church, it defined softball journalism. He said the other day that he didn’t join the church for political reasons, so he should be asked if he believes the teachings of ‘Black Liberation Theology’ that are routinely preached at Trinity Church.
I think you and Matt are dead on. This is a question about who he is and how he conducts himself. Giving Pfleger earmarks for his church is really troubling. Directing public funds to friends is typically something investigated not glossed over with ‘the people aren’t interested in this’ rhetoric.