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“I am not a bigot.”
“I did not have spiritual relations with that pastor.”
“It was a botched sermon.”
“I have a nightmare … “
I dunno, just guessing, but whatever it’s going to be, after several days of being beaten up over that crazy “old uncle” and the “God damn America … white America” thing, Obama wants to make a big speech about race and faith. He was up until nearly dawn yesterday writing it. I entirely don’t get it. Everyone knows it’s not possible for blacks to be racists. Maybe we’re going to get a guilt trip and a lecture about how we need to cut blacks some slack about that, because black racism is historically different from white racism, blah blah blah.*
UPDATES:
Quick Crit take: Not exactly a Checkers speech. More of a Checkered Past Speech.
*How right I was. Longer Crit take, Big Speech depressing:
I’ve been trying to figure out whether it was more condescending to black people, white people or Americans in general … Using all that history to cloak his very close association with a highly irresponsible, hate-spewing authority figure. Mrs. Nixon’s “plain Republican cloth coat” is pretty shabby compared to that grand mantle.
Earlier comment and commentary:
Politico: Race uproar offers test.
A successful address would go a long way toward answering Hillary Rodham Clinton’s complaint that Obama has never shown he can handle the rough-and-tumble nature of modern political combat.
A failure could leave many of the white independent voters — a key group behind Obama’s swift rise in national politics — doubting whether he is really the bridge-builder and healer he has portrayed himself to be.
I’d say a failure would be a disaster for Obama’s campaign and for race relations in this country, unless it manages to underscore the fact that racism is a two-way street, and racism is not the answer to racism. More likely, if he ends up being sidelined at the convention or crashes and burns in the general, he’ll be seen to have been done in by vindictive conservatives and goddamned white America, which will come out of this smeared as the racists because Obama’s crazy old uncle of a pastor is a bigot with a bad case of verbal diarrhea.
Here’s someone who thinks black racism is different, and has to be overlooked for the loftier goal of electing a black man president. “We are the change we have been waiting for” and all that. (Mental note for future reference: Andrew Sullivan is an apologist for racism.)
I have a sneaking suspicion Obama’s going to punt more or less along those lines. He is about hope and change, everything will be new and different in his promised land.
“I think it would have been naive for me to think I could run and end up with quasi-front-runner status in a presidential election as potentially the first African-American president, that issues [of] race wouldn’t come up, any more than Sen. Clinton could expect that gender issues might not come up,” Obama told interviewer Gwen Ifill on PBS’s “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.”
“I think we’ve got to talk about it,” he added. “I think we’ve got to process it. But we’ve got to remind ourselves that what we have in common is far more important than what’s different and that if we’re going to solve any of these problems, we’ve got to come together and bridge our differences in ways that we just have not bridged them before.”
What I’m not expecting is anything MLK-worthy. The one thing the civil rights movement tragically has not been about in the last 40 years is living up to these words:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
OK, links.
Shelby Steele’s must-read at WSJ: The Obama Bargain.
Klinghoffer at History News Network: Obama on how to talk to white people.
Malkin: Now you see it, now you don’t.
Surber with a musical interlude.
Gateway: Obama may want to rethink his New Black Panther Webpage.
Ace with more of Wright unplugged, unglued.
Riehl: Good luck with that!
Joyner, Outside the Beltway, while willing to tolerate black racism like Sullivan, figures Obama down might be as much racial progess as Obama up. Maybe, but being held to the same standards wasn’t what got him here and won’t be what an exit will be about.
Bevan at RCP: Obama’s new post-racial politics hoisted on petard of old racial politics.
Different, and yet not so different. Driscoll reviews Goldberg’s Century of Liberal Fascism.
Richard Cohen, WPost: What took so long?
MyDD: Republican hit-job.
Dem Daugherty at the Morning Call: Obama to be commended for standing by his church.
Topics: pols, racism
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:09 am on Tuesday, March 18, 2008
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March 18th, 2008 at 8:55 am
[...] Answer: I’ll kick that question over to Jules Crittenden. [...]
March 18th, 2008 at 10:34 am
(Mental note for future reference: Andrew Sullivan is an apologist for racism.)
Is there anything Andrew Sullivan isn’t an apologist for?
March 18th, 2008 at 10:52 am
We’re probably in for a finger wagging, minus the actual finger.
March 18th, 2008 at 11:09 am
Web Reconnaissance for 03/18/2008
A short recon of whats out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day…so check back often.
March 18th, 2008 at 11:26 am
[...] Jules Crittenden “I am not a bigot.” [...]
March 18th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
[...] Jules Crittenden [...]
March 18th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Well, I just read the speech.
Starts out with a history lesson. Not bad, but not particularly compelling, either. Followed by a short history of his own origins, better, but still nothing we didn’t already know.
Then he moves into a denunciation of Wright’s controversial sermons. Much more forceful than he’s done in the past. Admits that he heard the sermons (smart). Goes on to do a very good job of explaining why he didn’t abandon his church and Wright over this. This is by far the most compelling part of his speech, and the part that says what really needed to be said.
Should probably have summed it up there, but unfortunately… here comes the finger wagging. This is the longest part of the speech, and ruins a lot of what he accomplished earlier.
Sums up with an John Edwardsian anecdote. Yuck. Weak finish, IMO, but I suppose the fainters and cryers will like it.
March 18th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Call me a cynic, but this is just Obama doing damage control. If the Rev. Wright hadn’t been outed, Obama would have said anything.
March 18th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Is there anything Andrew Sullivan isn’t an apologist for?
As near as I can tell, white heterosexual males.
March 18th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Hot Air has some good reviews of The Messiah™’s speech, from both Captain Ed and Allah. Executive summary: Fine spin, narrow audience, not sincere, quite hypocritical.
March 18th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
“Speech text here.”
Nice spinning. When the spin stop, the truth remains that Obama has been a member of an organization that is utterly racist, and totally anti-American for 20 years. His church is a racist, anti-American (also pro-terrorist, pro-Baathist, etc.) organization, period.
Barack Obama isn’t fit to be POTUS, isn’t fit to be an American citizen, for that matter.
Wearing an American flag pin is a big deal for pols nowadays, but he refuses to do it. Why?
His wife says in effect, that nothing America has done is worth being proud of? Why?
He refuses to support a war against a nation that has helped terrorists murder Americans, has attacked our embassies, has tried to kill a former POTUS, and had been shooting at American aircraft for years, before we finally invaded that nation. Why?
Because the Obamas believe in the same crap Wright preaches, that’s why. They joined Wright’s hate cult masquerading as a Christian church, and have been active members in it for two decades, because it reflects their viewpoints.
Their church leader called on God to damn America and they’ve stayed with the church. Nothing else need be said.
You know why I don’t belong to the KKK or any racist organization? Because I don’t believe in their racist b.s. Too bad you can’t say the same about Obama’s clan.
March 18th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
The Rev. Wright and those of his ilk…extremes of the Left OR Right…..need a simple lesson, that mans best friend shows
March 18th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
And yet, in the end, Barack Obama’s candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton’s or Jesse Jackson’s.
~Shelby Steele
I don’t agree.
I have 0 respect for Jesse & Al.
Barack Obama is not in their “race/victimology pimp” league.
…the, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday — for 20 years — in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable.
That’s an assumption about Obama’s mother that can never be proven one way or the other.
I don’t think I (a Person of Pallor :-) I would feel “uncomfortable” experiencing a Reverend Wright diatribe.
Amazed., curious. Maybe even astounded, but, I really don’t think “uncomfortable”.
March 18th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
You know what I got out of it (and I’ll give you the condensed version)?
The Senator from Illinois has just advocated and endorsed minority set-asides for the language of hatred, offensiveness and vile divisiveness by virtue of some people’s inherent RIGHT to be angrier than others.
March 19th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
[...] Everyone and their mother has opined on Obama’s speech, yesterday, and I don’t have anything wise to say. I tend to agree with Tom Maguire; Obama probably did what he needed to do to assuage the Democrats, and those Independents who run center-left. As to its content and delivery, I suspect I align with Jon Podhoretz, in that the speech was both well-crafted and crafty. But I’m more interested in something beyond the speech. [...]