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Sen. Barack Obama is on a downswing.
He lost the Pennsylvania primary to Hillary
Clinton by a commanding margin, ten points. His preacher of 20
years, adviser, inspiration and father figure, Jeremiah Wright, went
on a media offensive chanting racist anti-white incantations over
national cable TV.
This forced American voters to take a second
look at what was once the most charismatic presidential candidate
since John F. Kennedy. Obama is losing favor before American voters.
Also, perception is growing that the Harvard-trained lawyer in
Saville Row suits is an elitist and out of touch with the average
American.
The possibility has become very real. Obama, 46,
the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas,
will lose the Democratic nomination to Hillary. And even if he
becomes the Democratic candidate, he will lose to aging Senator John
McCain. All because of race.
America is not ready for an African American
president. The most powerful nation on earth is more ready to
embrace the first woman white president. America, it seems, is a
racist at heart. It cannot have a black president, at least not
during this part of the 21st century.
Obama’s race problem surfaced about two months
ago when Wright’s incendiary racist sermons were circulated on
global television. The reverend said something like God damn
America. Obama responded to that by delivering a long but lofty
speech about race relations in America on March 18 in Philadelphia.
Referring to Wright as “my former pastor,”
he said the preacher used “incendiary language to express the
views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide,
but views that denigrade both the greatness and goodness of our
nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.”
Wright made Obama a Christian, officiated at his
wedding, and baptized his children. The Illinois senator’s
best-selling book, “The Audacity of Hope,” got its title from a
Wright sermon. In 2007, Obama contributed $26,000 to Wright’s
Trinity Church.
Race resurfaced during the April 16 Democratic
debate during which Obama did very poorly. This forced the senator
to rule out any further debates with Clinton.
Then Wright went on his road tour capping it
with an appearance at the National Press Club on April 28. The
floodgates opened.
The Economist describes what happened at the
Washington, DC, appearance.
“He (Wright) surrounded himself with some of
the most divisive figures in black America: Marion Barry,
Washington’s disgraced former mayor, Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New
Black Panther Party, Cornel West of Princeton University and a posse
of security guards supplied by the Nation of Islam. And he hurled a
succession of rhetorical bombs.
“He called Louis Farrakhan ‘one of the most
important voices in the 20th and 21st century.’ He talked about
whites worshipping in church in the morning and putting on white
Klan sheets at night. He defended his assertion that the American
government invented the HIV virus to decimate blacks (“Our
government is capable of doing anything.”). He even argued that
blacks and whites have different learning styles, further proof that
he endorses the racist theory that blacks and white have differently
wired brains.” Wright also dismissed Obama as a “politician.”
Wright announced that, if his ward becomes
president, he will be “coming after him” because he will
represent a government “whose policies grind under people.”
At first, Obama made a tepid response to the
Wright damage. “He does not speak for me,” he shrugged in
Wilmington, North Carolina. The next day, in Winston-Salem, the
senator totally disassociated himself from his pastor, calling
Wright’s performance “divisive and destructive.”
“Obama’s danger is being perceived by white
voters as representing a hostile, separate culture,” said Robert
Novak in his Washington Post column May 1.
To be sure, Wright is only one of Obama’s
major problems. There are two others. Tony Rezko, the indicted
fixer, and William Ayers, the terrorist.
In the Pennsylvania debate, Obama had trouble
explaining his associations with the three—Wright, Rezko, and
Ayers (at whose home Obama launched in 1995 what has become a
brilliant political career). Ayers and his Weather Underground
comrades planted bombs at the Pentagon, the US Capitol and other
buildings when Obama was eight years old. Obama’s character was
put on the line, not his promise of change and hope.
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