The Company You Keep

We judge a man, the saying goes, by the company he keeps. We don't judge a man by the family he is born into. And if you are born into a crotchety annoying family, it is counted a virtue up to a point to be indulgent and tolerant of their crotchets. The same would be true of crotchety grandmothers, whom Obama unceremoniously threw into the equivalence pot with the now notorious Jeremiah Wright. But Wright is not his grandma. Nor, so far as we can tell, did she willfully and publicly stoke the fires of racial paranoia.

That is why Obama's repeated claim that Jeremiah Wright is "like an old uncle" to him so badly begs the question. Wright is not an uncle. He's a pastor who was selected from among many such pastors in predominantly African-American Chicago congregations. The vast majority of those congregations preach the gospel of Christ as Martin Luther King understood it. That is, that God is no respecter of persons and judges us not by the color of our skin but by the "content of our character."

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The paranoid victimology that so unctuously oozes from Pastor Wright's speeches has no place in the hymnbook of MLK. It is much more in harmony with the racially charged views of Malcom X and of Wright's friend, the notoriously antisemitic Louis Farrakhan.

He is not Obama's uncle. Nor his grandmother. He was chosen by Obama to perform his wedding, baptize his children and, indeed, help to develop his children's cultural attitudes through his sermons and fellowship.

The two most dishonest moments in the speech were when he threw his grandma in the mix and when he compared Geraldine Ferraro to Mr. Wright, suggesting that one is no more offensive than the other. Ferraro's only mistake, as far as I know, was to point out quite reasonably that it is very unlikely that a white man with Obama's thin resume would ever be considered a serious candidate for president.

You can talk to me all day -- as Obama tried to today -- about the legitimate grievances of American's black underclass, and the sense in which Wright evokes and plays to those grievances. But you can't convince me that chaffing on such resentment in the paranoid, out-of-control manner of Mr. Wright is healing or helpful for those involved or healthy for the country as a whole.

Obama indulged such venom when it was politically useful for his plans to run for Congress from Chicago's South Side, at a time what he lacked street cred as a Hawaii and Harvard kid. Now, he cannot simply disclaim responsibility, merely because Wright is no longer an asset for his ambitions.

The challenge for Obama today was to convince us that he was either (a) somehow unaware of the depths of this venom, or that he (b) was compelled to overlook it because there was so much else good in the man.

In the first challenge, he essentially made no real effort. He kind of skirted the issue of how many of the absurd and hateful statements he had heard first hand. God damn America? America started AIDS? 9/11 is the chickens coming home to roost? US of KKK?

We have now heard several substantively different variants about his awareness. In truth, any effort to deny awareness of this stuff would fail the sniff test. No one who said the things Wright said -- heck, he read them from a prepared script, not even extemporized -- would ever be able to hide this ugly streak from a congregation regular. There is nothing in these tapes to suggest an ounce of discretion or reticence. Clearly, Obama was not blindsided by this nut case. He knew and chose to indulge and ignore, and he is now dissembling on that point.

On the second challenge, he also failed. He offered us no specifics as to what was so outstanding about the pastor's teaching or character that would encourage him to wink at his outrages. Obama left that -- as he leaves so much in his speeches -- in the domain of airy platitudes.


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