I think that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has been fatally damaged by the revelations of the extreme statements of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. A couple of examples:
“The government gives them [African Americans] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people,” he said in a 2003 sermon. “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.” [2003]
“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye …. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” [September 16, 2001]
A candidate for president of the United States cannot cozy up to someone with this kind of anti-American rhetoric. He has lost Main Street white America. Is anyone going to believe that he didn’t know about Wright’s views? Is anyone going to accept as an explanation that he wasn’t in attendance when these things were said? He’ll get clobbered in Pennsylvania, clobbered in Indiana, clobbered in Kentucky.
This isn’t about white racism. It’s about Wright racism.
I thought that Obama was exempt from racial reactions because he was the Tiger Woods of politics. People looked at him and saw him not as someone who is black, but as someone who transcended race because of his unique skills and accomplishments. Not any more. He just triple bogeyed the presidency. He’s done. He was done the day he first heard Wright’s outbursts and didn’t resign from the congregation. There is no way that the superdelegates will send him out as the Democratic nominee now. The truth is, Obama did fine until the Clinton campaign began to attack him, and then he showed that he just wasn’t up to it. Better we find out now than later.
