Barack Obama made his speech on race in America today, his attempt to quell the furor over the viciously anti-American sermons of his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
It was, as is every Obama speech, well crafted and superbly delivered. He spoke in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the Constitution, on that founding document’s fundamental theme: “toward a more perfect union.”
Other Obama speeches have been uplifting, if somewhat empty of substance. This one was not. It was a triangulation worthy of the Clintons. It may well knock Obama off his pedestal and drop him wetly into the Clintonian ooze below.
Obama again repudiated and condemned the words of his former pastor, who called on his congregation not to bless America but to damn it for its sins. Wright told his flock at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago that the government provides drugs to black Americans, gets them addicted, then locks them away in prison. He said days after the Sept. 11 attacks that America was getting what it deserved for its oppression of Palestinians and South Africans, that the deaths we suffered that day were nothing compared to what we had inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Hey, Wright has a right to his views. There are plenty of other Americans who share them. We call them “nuts.”
Obama went on to say that he recognizes America’s greatness. He noted his own story — son of a black Kenyan and a white woman from Kansas, educated at the finest schools, a senator and now a candidate for president. “I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”
Obama said there’s more to Rev. Wright than his lunatic pronouncements on the evils of America. There’s the charity work with the poor, day care services and prison ministries.
That’s nice.
For 20 years Obama sat in the pews of Trinity United as Rev. Wright, in between his good works, denounced America. I don’t doubt he shouted “Amen!” along with the rest of the congregation. Trinity and Rev. Wright’s warped views were fine by Obama — until they jeopardized his chances at the presidency. Only then did he raise his own voice in repudiation of those views.
That, my friends, is the definition of a Clintonian triangulation. And it may sink Obama’s candidacy.
We need a president who will stand up for the essential goodness of America and Americans all the time, not just when it serves his political ambitions.
