Playing dumb helps no one
In 2000, Democrats were outraged that, due to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bush v. Gore, not all of Florida’s presidential votes counted. In 2008, advanced thinkers supporting Sen. Barack Obama have persuaded themselves that fairness dictates none of them should count. Nor Michigan’s, either. Better that the voters of two critical swing states comprising close to 10 percent of the electorate be disenfranchised than Obama’s inevitable nomination be delayed.
Nobody is expected to notice the main reason Team Obama faulted every suggested revote plan: He wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance of winning either state’s primary. Rather than face that unpleasant truth, his supporters proposed various “compromises” with one common denominator: Obama be awarded delegates he hasn’t won. That this strikes them as reasonable reflects the deep unreality into which roughly half the Democratic Party has fallen.
Once again, with feeling: The votes belong to the voters, not the candidates. Oddly, it’s Sen. Hillary Clinton, who grasps that elementary democratic principle, whom critics say feels “entitled” to the presidency. Meanwhile, TV pundits like CNN’s Jack Cafferty warn us that should Obama’s supporters be disappointed in their hopes, “you wouldn’t want to live in this country.” A more concise way of turning the November contest into a racial referendum can’t be imagined. Who will win that one? Then what?
In Time, Mark Halperin provides a list of “Painful Things Hillary Clinton Knows — Or Should Know.” No. 7: “The Rev. Wright story notwithstanding, the media still wants Obama to be the nominee — and that has an impact every day.” We’ve come full circle. So confident have the Beltway media courtiers grown in their social and political status that what once was furiously denied is now boasted about. Politicians may come and go, but Chris Matthews, Howard Fineman, Tim Russert and Maureen Dowd preside over a permanent House of Lords.
Media coverage of Obama’s speech on race was characteristic. That it would be a brilliant piece of oratory was foreordained. After all, it was on Obama’s favorite theme, the subject of his two books and now his presidential campaign: himself as a living symbol of racial reconciliation.
As such, parts of Obama’s speech struck a deep chord with anybody concerned about America’s Original Sin of slavery and Jim Crow. Few Democrats could fail to be moved by his rebuttal of his pastor’s bitterly divisive, racially tinged rhetoric, with its “God Damn America!” and “USKKK!”
“The profound mistake of the Rev. Wright’s sermons,” Obama said, “is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country — a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.
“But what we know — what we have seen — is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope — the audacity to hope — for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”
Except here’s my problem, several problems actually: The dream of a multiracial coalition to heal America’s wounds isn’t new. It’s the dream of Martin Luther King Jr., murdered 40 years ago next month. Putting aside the fact that Obama’s first reaction to videotapes of Wright’s crackpot rants was to go on TV denying he’d ever heard them, what was Mr. Hope doing sitting in a Chicago pew listening to this rubbish?
Granted, more malignant nonsense is vended in the name of God than all other topics combined. Are Wright’s views more objectionable than Pat Robertson’s or John Hagee’s? I’d say less. At least he doesn’t predict the future, or blame events like Hurricane Katrina or the 9/11 attacks on people’s sex lives. That said, how could Obama be so politically incompetent not to anticipate that Wright’s inflammatory sermons were certain to emerge during the campaign? He peddles DVDs on the church Web site. Could Obama possibly imagine they’d help build that coalition King dreamed of?
Second, what do the Obamas, Harvard Law graduates, tell their two little girls about Wright’s downright delusional contention that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus to exterminate African-Americans? Anybody named Clinton or Gore who sat still for something like that would be derided as an inauthentic phony patronizing black folk for political gain — a faker, a conman.
Cosseted and protected all his life, Obama’s speech shows he understands the Wrights of this world do as much to keep blacks down as white racism does. All this self-pitying obsessing over the sorrows of history leads nowhere. So how come he’s been sitting there for 20 years pretending he doesn’t get it?
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].