Wright Way Wrong Way
March 28th, 2008Jeremiah Wright is going to be the death of Barack Obama in bitterly-contested states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio. Wright has been set loose once again, this time for slurring Italians, and there’s plenty more where that came from, my common sense tells me and Slate magazine confirms. In what will be a potential knock-out blow with white voters when Republicans get a hold of it, Barack Obama seems to endorse particularly nasty bits from the first sermon of Wright’s Obama ever attended.
On Hugh Hewitt’s radio show yesterday, he played excerpts of Barack Obama reading from his autobiography, Dreams of My Father. In one, Obama remembers a sermon by Rev. Jeremiah Wright:
[T]he pastor described going to a museum and being confronted by a painting title Hope.
“The painting depicts a harpist,” Revernd Wright explained, “a woman who at first glance appears to be sitting atop a great mountaintop. Untill you take a closer look and see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is then drawn down to the scene below, down to the valley below, where everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation.
It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, aprtheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere … That’s the world! on which hope sits.”
And so it went, a meditation on a fallen world. … [E.A.]
Sounds … controversial! Keep in mind: a) Obama isn’t disapproving of this sermon. In the book he weeps at the end of it; b) Demonstrating that at least some blaming of “white greed” for the world’s sins–which Obama now criticizes– isn’t an exceptional topic for Rev. Wright in a few wacky sermons Obama may or may not have missed. It’s at the quotidian core of the Afrocentric philosophy that Obama says drew him to the church; c) Indeed, in his big Feb. 18th race speech Obama reads the passage from his book that describes his emotional reaction to this very sermon (his “first service at Trinity”)–how it made “the story of a people” seem “black and more than black.” d) This is also the sermon that gave Obama the title of his next book, The Audacity of Hope. e) The “profound mistake” of this sermon is not that Wright “spoke as if our society was static”–Obama’s analysis on Feb. 18th. The problem is that “white folks’ greed” is not the main cause of a “world in need.”
I’m not saying voters shouldn’t cut Obama a lot of slack on Wright’s anti-white fulminations. But the Senator should have spoken up publicly against the semi-paranoid “white greed” explanation a long time ago, no? And he could show a little humility. Again, this wasn’t the occasion for him to be lecturing everyone else
I have said before that I think this election is going to ruin politics for a wide variety of young people, and I stand by that. But the truth is that Barack Obama has never been a candidate I can get behind. He is a radical masquerading as a moderate, closer to George McGovern than Hubert Humphrey, John Kennedy than Harry Truman, and I’m just not a fan. Worse, I am a Democrat who does not like to lose and is in fact tired of it. I do not see Obama as hope for America. I see him as a platitude, and besides, I don’t believe that “unity” and “coming together” is a Presidency. Believe me, I am all about coming together and making friends — ask anyone at my College, and they will tell you I am a social butterfly who does not like to make enemies because at my core I believe we can work any problems out if we sit down and decide to — but this is not a campaign, and it does not inspire me. The greatness of America isn’t in sitting down to hold hands. It’s in being free to walk off and do things your own way, and that is another reason I don’t think he will resonate. I’ve written about this all before, but now he is slowly showing himself to have weaknesses that are, perhaps, fatal.