Last week, Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama showed us why he is just another smarmy politician and not the Great Unifier as some have named him. In a disingenuous speech, marginally designed to distance Obama from his whackado minster Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the Senator managed to turn the issue from the anti-American rantings of Reverend Wright to a thinly veiled condemnation of those calling out the Reverend's words. At the heart of Obama's speech is the theme that the Reverend isn't wrong, but that everyone else needs to pay more attention to race. The Senator's exact quote, '...race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now'*. When have we ever ignored race in this country? If anything, we are so obsessed with race that we see racial slights in the most mundane and inconsequential events. Obama's slickness however, isn't that he re-framed the question to be about race rather than anti-American ramblings by his Black Separatist pastor, but how he was able to talk for 20 minutes and never really say anything of substance.
    In ten pages of text, Senator Obama never distances himself from Wright, if anything, the speech is almost a defense of the Reverend. Obama said “I can no more disown him [Reverend Wright] than I can disown the black community”.  One clearly cannot disown his race, but you can drive to a different church on Sunday. When the Senator says he disagrees with some of the more inflammatory comments (though he never actually says which comments he disagrees with: that the AIDS virus was created by the government to wipe out the black community; that the chickens have come home to roost in reference to 9/11; or that God should damn the USA) he is quick to add that we've all heard things from our “pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you [we've] strongly disagreed.” You are correct Senator, but when I found myself 'strongly disagreeing' with something my priest said, I left the church. I didn't continue to go there week after week, year after year, giving implicit endorsement by my presence or financial endorsement through my offerings.
    The Senator believes that we still need to march to a “more just, more equal, more free, more caring, and more prosperous America”. What the Senator doesn't do is tell us how we will know when we get there. Does 'more equal' mean a level playing field in which one isn't given preferential treatment based on skin color, gender, sexual orientation or family ties? If the answer is yes, then the Senator should say so and let the discussion begin. If the answer is no, then the Senator wants to have the same old arguments about race—the lectures in which whites must listen but are not allowed to contribute. Obama then goes on to say that we need to move on about race, but spends two paragraphs defending why Reverend Wright is still stuck in the fifties and sixties with regards to racial relations.
    Supporters and apologists for Senator Obama have called him an 'inspirational speaker'. The New York Observer wrote an article about Obama's delivery essentially calling him a cross between Dr. Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy (“What Makes Obama a Good Speaker?”, http://www.observer.com/2008/what-makes-obama-good-speaker), and no one can deny Obama's oratory skills. The content of this speech however, is more like a Bruce Willis movie than a JFK speech, all flash and no substance.
    Reverend Wright is certainly free to say what he believes. Though he may want to cover the original sin concept again. According to Obama, “it [the Constitution] was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery”. Technically, according to Christian cannon, original sin was man's violation of God's law. Just saying. Scriptural inaccuracies aside, Reverend Wright's job is to shepard his congregation as he sees fit. Senator Obama also has every right to attend the church of his choice. The Senator is asking us to use his past judgment as a benchmark to award him the presidency of the US. I agree. Twenty years of support to a vehemently anti-American pastor tells us quite a bit about the Senator's judgment.
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*All quotes unless indicated otherwise are from the Remarks of Senator Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union” Speech. Given at the Constitution Center, Tuesday, March 18th, 2008, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.