Quoted Text

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.

This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

“People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.”

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans — the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons 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 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.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

There is one story in particularly that I’d like to leave you with today – a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”

“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

Quoted Text

Obama too slow denouncing bigotry
Richard Cohen

    Some questions: Why did Barack Obama take so long to “reject outright” the harshly critical statements about America made by his minister, Jeremiah Wright, not to mention the praise the same minister lavished on Louis Farrakhan just last November?
    How is it possible that Obama did not know about these remarks when he is a member of Wright’s congregation and so close to the man that he likens him to “an old uncle“?
    How is it possible that a campaign apparatus that sniffed out Geraldine Ferraro’s offensive statement to a local California newspaper (The Daily Breeze, 12th paragraph) did not know that Wright’s statements condemning America were all over the Internet and had been cited March 6 by the (reputable) anti-Obama columnist Ronald Kessler? The sermon was also available on YouTube.
    In other words, how is it possible that a man who has made judgment the centerpiece of his entire presidential campaign has shown so little of it in this matter?
    One possible answer to these questions is that Obama has learned to rely on a sycophantic media that hears any criticism of him as either (1) racist, (2) vaguely racist or (3) doing the bidding of Hillary and Bill Clinton. You only have to turn your attention to the interview Obama granted MSNBC’s fawning Keith Olbermann for an example. Obama was asked whether he had known that Wright had suggested substituting the phrase “God damn America” for “God bless America.”
    “You know, frankly, I didn’t,” Obama said. “I wasn’t in church during the time when the statements were made.”
    But had you heard about them? Did your crack campaign staff alert you? And what about Wright’s honoring Farrakhan? Had you heard about that? Did you feel any obligation to denounce those remarks — not Farrakhan, as you had done, but Wright himself? Don’t you consider yourself a public figure that others look to for leadership? Do you think you failed them here?
    Olbermann asked none of those questions.
    In a certain sense, I am sympathetic toward Obama. When he said of Wright, “Because of his life experience, (he) continues to have a lot of anger and frustration, and will express that in ways that are very different from me and my generation,” anyone who knows anything about the black experience in America has to nod his head.
    The 66-year-old Wright was born when blacks were still being lynched, when Jim Crow ruled the South — and when raw bigotry prevailed virtually everywhere else. He knows a different America than the one familiar to most whites. I can also understand why Farrakhan has a following in black America. He may be a gutter anti-Semite, but he stands up to whites, and within parts of the African-American community, he is admired for, among other things, rehabilitating criminals.
    So for Obama, Wright posed a dilemma. The minister is well-known and respected and clearly adored by Obama. His language of resentment, even of hate, has a certain context to Obama. It does not shock. I understand, really I do.
    But a presidential candidate is not a mere church member and operates in a different context. We examine everything about him for the slightest clue about character. On Wright, Obama has shown a worrisome tic. He has done so also with his relationship with Tony Rezko, the shadowy Chicago political figure. Obama last week submitted to a grilling on this matter by the staff of The Chicago Tribune and was given a clean bill of health. I accept it. But that hardly changes the fact that Obama should never have done business with Rezko in the first place. He concedes that now, but it was still a failure of judgment.
    After I wrote in January about Wright’s praise for Farrakhan, I was pilloried by Obama supporters who accused me of all manner of things, including insanity. But when I asked some of them what they would have done if their minister had extolled David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan official, or Rabbi Meir Kahane, the late anti-Arab racist, they either rejected the question entirely or simply didn’t answer. Don’t they think that everyone, particularly a public figure, has an obligation to denounce bigotry, as well as those who praise the bigots themselves?
    As I wrote in that first column, the manifest abilities and stunning political talents of Barack Obama still recommend him to the presidency. But he has been less than forthright or responsible about Wright. This does not disqualify him for the White House, but it does suggest that if the vaunted red phone rings at 3 a.m., there might be times when he will simply not answer.
Richard Cohen is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Quoted Text

Obama faces racial divide head-on
Hopeful responds to damage from pastor’s remarks
BY NEDRA PICKLER AND MATT APUZZO
The Associated Press

    PHILADELPHIA — Barack Obama confronted the nation’s racial divide head-on Tuesday, tackling both black grievance and white resentment in a bold effort to quiet a campaign uproar over race and his former pastor’s incendiary statements.
    Standing before a row of eight American flags near the building where the Declaration of Independence was adopted, Obama urged the nation to break “a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years.’”
    “The anger is real,” he said. “It is powerful, and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”
    The speech, at the National Constitution Center, was by far the most prominent airing of racial issues in Obama’s 13-month campaign to become the first black president. It was prompted by the wider notice his former pastor’s racial statements have been receiving in the past week or so.
    He said he recognized his race has been a major issue in a campaign that has taken a “particularly divisive turn.” Many people have been turning to the Internet to view statements by his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who suggested in one sermon that the United States brought the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on itself and in another said blacks should damn America for continuing to mistreat them.
    Obama rejected Wright’s divisive statements but still embraced the man who brought him to Christianity, officiated at his wedding, baptized his two daughters and inspired the title of his book “The Audacity of Hope.”
    “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community,” Obama said. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
    Obama’s father is a black man from Kenya who left the family when he was 2. He was raised by his white mother and her parents in Hawaii.
    Wright’s controversial statements have gotten new life as his church’s most prominent member became the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. A CBS News poll taken Sunday and Monday indicated most voters had heard at least something about Wright’s comments, and about a third said they made them feel more negative.
FACING THE ISSUE
    Obama at first tried to avoid the controversy. Then he responded Friday in a blog entry on the Huffington Post in which he said he was not in church to hear those comments and condemned them. That only increased news coverage, and Obama’s advisers said he came to them Saturday saying he wanted to deliver a major speech to address the controversy and broader problems of race in the country.
    Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama’s chief Democratic rival, said she was glad Obama had given the speech.
    “Issues of race and gender in America have been complicated throughout our history, and they are complicated in this primary campaign,” said Clinton, also campaigning in Philadelphia. “There have been detours and pitfalls along the way, but we should remember that this is a historic moment for the Democratic Party and for our country. We will be nominating the first African-American or woman for the presidency of the United States, and that is something that all Americans can and should celebrate.”
    Obama’s speech also drew praise from one of his former Democratic presidential rivals who has not endorsed him or Clinton. Delaware Sen. Joe Biden called it powerful, truthful and “one of most important speeches we’ve heard in a long time”
    “He told the story of America — both the good and the bad — and I believe his speech will come to represent an important step forward in race relations in our country,” Biden said.
    Obama advisers said he wrote the deeply personal speech himself. They said it was delivered in Philadelphia because of the city’s historical significance, not because it is the most populous black city in Pennsylvania, site of the next primary vote on April 22.

Quoted Text

O'Reilly: Media Burying Obama Pastor Story
Tuesday, March 18, 2008 8:36 AM
By: Philip V. Brennan     

It is a major scandal that threatens to derail Barack Obama's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, but the mainstream media is treating it as a minor political scuffle, says Fox's Bill O'Reilly.

In his talking points memo Monday night, O'Reilly played tapes of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright's (Obama's former pastor's) rants against the United States and then said that all clear-thinking Americans including Sen. Obama are appalled by what he called "those hateful words."

Noting that Obama said that the picture being painted of Wright is not accurate, O'Reilly wanted to know what about it was inaccurate and added, "Americans also don't know very much about Barack Obama. And so he has some explaining to do — and not with soft-ball interviewers either."

"How," O'Reilly asked "can you have a close association with an American hater for 20 years? Surely Senator Obama knew how Wright felt even though he might not have heard the exact words. Also, what kind of judgment allows a sitting senator to attend a church that radical?"

O'Reilly noted that the latest Rasmussen poll shows Obama losing support across the country — his favorability rating is down five points in three days, and the Wright controversy is the force driving them.

"The folks don't want leadership that is associated with that kind of hatred," O'Reilly said. "At this point, the story tells us more about the media than Senator Obama. And remember the very liberal New York Times attacked John McCain for associating with a lobbyist nobody ever heard of."

"The Times," he recalled, "put the story on page one and the liberal media ran with it. The McCain story was about association and judgment and what's the Obama story about? Association and judgment. But The New York Times buried the pastor story — the paper must think its readers are stupid.

"Likewise, the nightly network news programs have downplayed the situation. On Friday, ABC News ignored it and NBC News gave it 20 seconds."

Had his "O'Reilly Factor" not broken the story wide last Thursday night, he said, "it would have likely died which is exactly what the leftist media wants.

"Finally Barack Obama says he deplored the racial aspect of the story, but who is really pushing race?" O'Reilly asked, adding, "I believe that would be [Obama's] former pastor and far-left zealots like Media Matters and Jesse Jackson. They are the chief race baiters in America."

"The Wright story," O'Reilly said, "is here to stay. Voters aren't going to forget it. Senator Obama should realize that and confront the issues on programs like this one where millions would see him, and he would get a fair hearing. If he does not fully explain his association with Pastor Wright he will not be elected president."

Quoted Text

Throw Grandma Under the Bus
by Ann Coulter

Posted: 03/19/2008

Obama gave a nice speech, except for everything he said about race. He apparently believes we're not talking enough about race. This is like hearing Britney Spears say we're not talking enough about pop-tarts with substance-abuse problems.

By now, the country has spent more time talking about race than John Kerry has talked about Vietnam, John McCain has talked about being a POW, John Edwards has talked about his dead son, and Al Franken has talked about his USO tours.

But the "post-racial candidate" thinks we need to talk yet more about race. How much more? I had had my fill by around 1974. How long must we all marinate in the angry resentment of black people?

As an authentic post-racial American, I will not patronize blacks by pretending Obama's pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is anything other than a raving racist loon. If a white pastor had said what Rev. Wright said -- not about black people, but literally, the exact same things -- I think we'd notice that he's crazier than Ward Churchill and David Duke's love child. (Indeed, both Churchill and the Rev. Wright referred to the attacks of 9/11 as the chickens coming "home to roost.")

Imagine a white pastor saying: "Racism is the American way. Racism is how this country was founded, and how this country is still run. ... We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority. And believe it more than we believe in God."

Imagine a white pastor calling Condoleezza Rice, "Condoskeezza Rice."

Imagine a white pastor saying: "No, no, no, God damn America -- that's in the Bible for killing innocent people! God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human! God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme!"

We treat blacks like children, constantly talking about their temper tantrums right in front of them with airy phrases about black anger. I will not pat blacks on the head and say, "Isn't that cute?" As a post-racial American, I do not believe "the legacy of slavery" gives black people the right to be permanently ill-mannered.

Obama tried to justify Wright's deranged rants by explaining that "legalized discrimination" is the "reality in which Rev. Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up." He said that a "lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families."

That may accurately describe the libretto of "Porgy and Bess," but it has no connection to reality. By Rev. Wright's own account, he was 12 years old and was attending an integrated school in Philadelphia when Brown v. Board of Education was announced, ending "separate but equal" schooling.

Meanwhile, at least since the Supreme Court's decision in University of California v. Bakke in 1978 -- and obviously long before that, or there wouldn't have been a case or controversy for the court to consider -- it has been legal for the government to discriminate against whites on the basis of their race.

Consequently, any white person 30 years old or younger has lived, since the day he was born, in an America where it is legal to discriminate against white people. In many cases it's not just legal, but mandatory, for example, in education, in hiring and in Academy Award nominations.

So for half of Rev. Wright's 66 years, discrimination against blacks was legal -- though he never experienced it personally because it existed in a part of the country where he did not live. For the second half of Wright's life, discrimination against whites was legal throughout the land.

Discrimination has become so openly accepted that -- in a speech meant to tamp down his association with a black racist -- Obama felt perfectly comfortable throwing his white grandmother under the bus. He used her as the white racist counterpart to his black racist "old uncle," Rev. Wright.

First of all, Wright is not Obama's uncle. The only reason we indulge crazy uncles is that everyone understands that people don't choose their relatives the way they choose, for example, their pastors and mentors. No one quarrels with idea that you can't be expected to publicly denounce your blood relatives.

But Wright is not a relative of Obama's at all. Yet Obama cravenly compared Wright's racist invective to his actual grandmother, who "once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

Rev. Wright accuses white people of inventing AIDS to kill black men, but Obama's grandmother -- who raised him, cooked his food, tucked him in at night, and paid for his clothes and books and private school -- has expressed the same feelings about passing black men on the street that Jesse Jackson has.

Unlike his "old uncle" -- who is not his uncle -- Obama had no excuses for his grandmother. Obama's grandmother never felt the lash of discrimination! Crazy grandma doesn't get the same pass as the crazy uncle; she's white. Denounce the racist!

Fine. Can we move on now?

No, of course, not. It never ends. To be fair, Obama hinted that we might have one way out: If we elect him president, then maybe, just maybe, we can stop talking about race.

Quoted Text

Susan Estrich
America needs to talk about race
Susan Estrich is a nationally syndicated columnist.

    Would Barack Obama be where he is if he weren’t black?
    Would Hillary Clinton be where she is if she weren’t a woman?
    Would Geraldine Ferraro be where she is if her name had been Gerald?
    I’m not even going to touch the first two, lest I be forced to resign from a position I don’t have or given one so I can resign from it.
    I’ll stick with the third question, which Gerry Ferraro, who is my former boss and longtime friend, has answered thousands of times herself.
    Walter Mondale picked her over Michael Dukakis (yes, he was the other choice) in 1984, because he wanted to shuffle the deck, change the dynamic, bring excitement and a sense of making history to what was already seen as a long-shot effort to unseat the very popular incumbent, Ronald Reagan.
    In other words, he picked her because she was a woman. Gerald wouldn’t have gotten it. Is there something wrong with that?
    That doesn’t mean she didn’t deserve it. It doesn’t mean she wasn’t qualified. It just means gender matters. In her case, unlike every election before or since, it mattered in a way that resulted in a qualified woman getting the nod instead of a qualified man. And I don’t think it’s sexist to say that.
    Geraldine Ferraro is many things — outspoken, spontaneous, sometimes outrageous, but always courageous, loyal and loving. I adore her. But that’s not my point. One thing she isn’t — I know this, and I think Barack Obama does, as well — is racist.
    I don’t think she in any way meant to put Obama down by pointing to his race as an essential element of his appeal. It is an essential element of his appeal. That doesn’t mean he’s the affirmative action candidate. It doesn’t mean he’s unqualified or undeserving. Recognizing that race matters is exactly what critical race theorists have been arguing for years to those who have claimed that we can or should be colorblind. Impossible, they’ve said all along. Is it now racist to recognize that they’re right?
    We need to be able to talk about race without forcing whoever brings it up to resign from whatever honorary position they may hold. It’s the white elephant in the room that you’re not supposed to acknowledge, but at which everyone stares, as it grows larger due to the forced silence. Guess what? There’s a white elephant in the room. Or, to be politically correct, an elephant of some color, which we will not mention. A large, colorless elephant. Is it better if we leave it at that?
    Calling someone a racist, accusing someone of racism, those are ways to end the conversation, not begin it. Simply denouncing someone that way doesn’t tell us anything about why they’re wrong, if they’re wrong.
    Somebody should have asked Geraldine Ferraro what she meant, and why, instead of denouncing her for saying it. Maybe she’s right. Maybe she’s wrong. But it’s important to discuss it, and not outdo ourselves condemning her.
    This is a unique and unprecedented campaign. A black man is running against a woman for the nomination of one of the two major parties. It’s down to the two of them. Whoever wins is making history. Voters will confront a choice they have never before faced. It’s a big deal. It does matter. Saying that is neither racist nor sexist. Letting people actually discuss what they mean, what it means to them, and why and how both race and gender do matter might actually help us move forward to the point where both matter less.

Quoted Text

Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE
Obama: transcending race no longer
Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com.

    To me the revelation that Barack Obama has been cozy for the past 20 years with aracial demagogue of a preacher is every bit as stunning as the revelation that Eliot Spitzer was laundering money to pay for expensive prostitutes.
    In each case the private truth is so at odds with the public persona that I just can’t reconcile the two in my own mind.
    Spitzer we now know about.
    But Obama — that cool, polished, dignified campaigner, who presents himself as “transcending race” —the idea of him sitting voluntarily, Sunday after Sunday, in a church with a preacher who hollers, moans and caterwauls against the iniquities of white America, indicates to me a disconnect that is just as disturbing as the disconnect we discovered in Spitzer.
    Maybe Obama did not hear the precise sermons, or the precise snippets of sermons, that are available on YouTube and that prompted the recent flap, but I cannot believe that a preacher who uttered such astounding words with such incendiary passion on some Sundays was saying anything vastly different on other Sundays.
    What astounding words? These for example:
    “They want us to sing God Bless America? No, no, no! God damn America! That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating its citizens as less than human. God damnAmerica as long as she tries to act like she is God and she is supreme.”
    This is the preacher whom Obama identifies as his spiritual adviser. This is the man he says is “like family,” even in his speech the other day in which he tried to control the damage.
    Listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is like listening to Louis Farrakahn, to whom, in fact, Wright gave an award, the previously unheard of “Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Lifetime Achievement Trumpeteer Award.”
    There is the same nurturing of racial grievance, the same playing to victimhood, greeted with the same enthusiastic response from the congregation, the same whoops of approval.
    Barack Obama has been a proud member of that congregation since before he was a candidate for president, before he was a U.S. senator, before he was an Illinois state senator, before he was married, going back to his days as a just-beginning lawyer in Chicago.
    In other words it is where he has felt at home since before he had any reason to burnish an image for public inspection. As we know now, it was by his choice the Rev. Jeremiah Wright presided at his wedding and baptized his two children. It was from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that he got the title for his book “The Audacity of Hope.”
    And Wright is a preacher who, at least at his most florid, goes well beyond the Rev. Al Sharpton and intrudes on the territory of Malcolm X.
    A preacher who in fact, when the attacks of 9/11 occurred, in his next sermon, hollered, “America’s chickens are coming home to roost!” just as Malcolm X declared when President Kennedy was assassinated.
    This is the man that Obama has called a friend and a “great leader.” A man that we can see on YouTube referring to the United States of America as “the U.S. of K.K.K.-A.”
    For Obama to say now that he didn’t agree with everything the preacher said strikes me as hardly adequate. And for him to give a wise and balanced speech on the history of race relations in America, as he just did, also strikes me as hardly adequate. It’s like Eliot Spitzer giving a speech on the history of marital fidelity. It might be a fine speech, but it doesn’t change the reality.
    And no, I do not give more im- portance to the religious connections of one candidate than another. I think we ought to remember that Jerry Falwell, whom John McCain went to Liberty University to suck up to, blamed 9/11 on “the pagans, the abortionists, the gay and lesbians, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America,” and we ought to ask McCain to explain himself also.
    We ought to ask how he comes to regard the Rev. Rod Parsley as his “spiritual guide,” having in mind that Parsley, a proponent of faith-healing, has declared that Mohammed “received revelations from demons and not from the true God.”
    But with McCain I can’t help thinking these religious connections of his, which are recent, are just a way of pandering to Christian primitives for the sake of their votes and don’t indicate anything more about him than cynicism and opportunism, the common building material of most politicians.
    Obama’s connection with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, going back as far as it does, has to indicate something more heartfelt, and now, I’m sorry, when I look at him I can no longer see a cool and reasonable exemplar of multiracial and multicultural America. Now I see a closet racial malcontent privately at odds with his own public persona.
    I see an example of what conservatives consistently claim about liberals, that they are anti-American, which is reinforced by the recent words of Obama’s wife that for the first time in her life she was proud of being an American.
    Conservatives pounced on that. I thought it was just an unfortunate slip of no consequence, but now I see that it made sense, since she too has been a follower of the Rev. Wright these many years.
    The message of the Rev. Wright, imbibed by Barack and Michelle Obama, is that America is a lousy racist country ruled by rich white people to the detriment of black folks, simple as that. Apparently it’s a message that many black folks are still happy to hear and that the Obamas also were happy to hear.
    Obama’s giving himself a backdrop of eight American flags for his damage-control speech the other day underscored his worry that the truth was now out in the open. When his speech was delayed and then delayed some more, I couldn’t help thinking, maybe he has gone to get more flags. Maybe he figured eight wasn’t enough.
    I will wait and see if he can become the Democratic Party’s candidate for president.
    You may agree or not agree with my assessment, but either way you are welcome to post your response on my blog, which you can fi nd at http://www.dailygazette.com.