Efforts to link Obama, radicals reaching too far
Does anyone really think he's some kind of bad, scary guy?
Here's what I don't get about the whole brouhaha concerning Barack Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright:
In the final analysis, what do you think it really says about Obama that he would have Wright as a pastor?
Let's just say for argument's sake that Wright really is some sort of extremist black radical, as some people would have you believe, as opposed to a generally well-intentioned guy who sometimes says some crazy stuff by white people's standards, as I believe to be closer to the truth.
I mean it, though, let's presume for a minute Wright really is this bad, scary guy.
Does anybody really think that makes Obama some kind of bad, scary guy? Do you think he's some sort of secret black radical trying to sneak into the presidency of the United States so he can push his secret black power agenda?
If that's the implication -- and I think that's part of where this is really pointed, even if it's left unspoken -- I think that's crazier than any of the things Wright has to say.
The attempts to link Obama to 1960s radical William Ayers are more of the same nonsense.
The whole country has been watching Obama now for nearly a year and a half, and yes, we definitely have learned some things we didn't know about him when we started.
But surely, at this point, we have a sense of the man. We have an idea who he is. These political candidates can only manipulate their own image to a point. Even with a tightly controlled candidate like Obama, the veneer gets peeled back sooner or later. You see them more or less for who they are.
And what I think you see is that there isn't much about Obama that's extreme.
If anything, he's boringly mainstream.
Sure, he's liberal, understandably too liberal for many of you, but still well within the norms of the Democratic Party.
This is not a radical person. He's a guy who generally tries to play it safe, who looks for the middle ground. Is that a political calculation? Probably. Is it covering up something sinister? Please.
What I see in Obama more clearly than when this campaign started is somebody who wants to be everybody's friend, who wants everybody to like him, perhaps to a fault. He doesn't seem particularly comfortable with confrontation of any sort, which may be one reason Hillary Clinton kept getting the best of him in their debates.
On matters of race, this also holds true. As much as I liked his speech on race in Philadelphia for its eloquence and clear thinking, he didn't say anything particularly risky, unless you count being honest about the less enlightened racial views of his white grandmother, for which he was immediately attacked because white people don't like to admit that's the atmosphere in which they were brought up.
Here's a guy with a black father and a white mother, and yet we define him -- and anyone like him -- as black for reasons that are still hard to logically explain. Rather than fight that notion, however, he accepts it. He knows he is a black man in America, with everything good and bad that accrues from that.
I think back on those early days of the campaign when the question was: "Is he black enough?" At the time, that was the thinking being pushed mostly by Clinton supporters, who were still suffering under the illusion that she would have strong African-American support left over from her husband's presidency.
As insulting as that line of questioning was, I think it actually struck at something closer to the truth about Obama than the opposite impression created by the snippets of Wright's sermons.
Arguably, Obama's early days were not totally a product of the black experience, at least not the mainstream black experience. As I think others have suggested, maybe that's what drew him to Wright's church. If he wanted to get brought up to speed, I'd say by now he's earned extra credit.
Some question why he stayed with the church, and I take him at his word. He found good in the man and his impact on the community, plus he didn't accept everything he had to say.
With so much about Obama seeming to have been packaged for this run at the presidency, I take it as a positive that he didn't try to sweep away this part of his life in preparation for the campaign.
Obama probably didn't fully appreciate, though, that there was always a segment of America that was looking for an excuse to justify being against him.
