Charles Murray:
And he means it.
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Bell Curve Author On Obama Speech
18 Mar 2008 01:15 pm
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Yup, the sick, broken people like Robert Ethan know a real threat to their divisive games when they see one. Hence the capital-letter hysteria.
Robert, this time with your use of CAPS, you have managed to convince me.
See, I know you really mean that, Mr. Ethan, cause of your use of the caps lock button. I appreciate and commend your clarity.
Somebody's gotta break it to poor Mr. Ethan that CAPS LOCK does not make his arguments persuasive.
Does Robert Ethan know he can use different aliases and be a better troll?
I saw the comment earlier by Charles Murray and found it pretty stunning. It's sad that even someone with his divisive history on race is able to make a more objective response to that speech than his compatriots. But unfortunately everything is seen through such a prism, so instead of having an even-handed discussion on race and the role it plays in our society, we'd rather scream "race baiter" or something else.
The speech was brilliant. Pretty, in fact.
It was also Nixonian; it equated wildly disparate events (grannie and her racism decades ago; Wright and his hate speech now). It was a rehash of Nixon's "everyone does it."
With due deference to Charles Murray, the speech did not accomplish what it should have: give an adequate explanation of how a bright man such as Obama could sit still through twenty years of Jeremiah Wright's blame America-blame whitey rhetoric.
Obama should have stated, without equivocation, that he should have left Trinity UCC a long time ago. And that he did not was a lapse in judgment.
He did not so state. My assessment is that it was a great speech on race relations, generally. But a poor explanation for his own behavior.
It will hurt him with independents and those Democrats not already firmly ensconced in his camp.
I guess Murray is tired of all the threatening letters and the academic blackballing he has had to endure over the years.
No better way to end that than to speak directly to the source of both, Loony Lefty Land. Where Howard the Duck, Dowdy Old Mo, Airyanus Huff'n'puff, Strident Nancy, "Mighty Mouth" Moulitas, et al. traipse hand in hand, singing the praises of the Way coolest, Brand newest, Far ****ing outest Dude evah...........CRACK ALABAMA!
John -
I respectfully disagree with your assessment of the speech's failing. I think he has made it clear that Wright brought him to Christianity & he felt that Wright and the church did many good deeds in the community. To the extent that he disagreed with Wright, he understood Wright's positions as a product of his generation & their different views on the ability of America to evolve.
Did you hear/read the part of his book on his rebirth? I am not Christian, but I imagine that it was a powerful turning point in his life.
Furthermore, I do think Obama made perfectly clear what his positions are in this area, so that his positions should be not confused with Wright's.
Now, will such a nuanced response fly with middle of the road voters? I don't know the answer to that. I felt that he spoke a difficult truth today. And he showed moral courage in sticking by Wright, who, for all of his failings, was important to Obama, when it would have been convenient/expedient to jettison him completely.
Again, I think this was his only path today & as a supporter of his, I am proud of him. But I agree with you that it might mean that he will not become the next President.
What Murray's statement shows is that only people who actually are willing to argue or tackle unorthodox or non-mainstream views are willing to tolerate intellectual differences and nuance.
Everyone else is too busy forcing everyone and everything into neat little boxes and imposing a 'national' or overarcing politics or culture to realize that our society is too diverse to be homogenized like that anymore. We have no choice but to embrace nuance and difference, trumpet what we have in common and then work towards common goals.
That goes double for the Right at this moment, but has applied and likely will do so again in the future to the Left.
Muslim smears emerge, Obama rebuts them by saying he sits in the pews of trinity every sunday.
Wright controversy emerges, Obama claims that he happened to be away every time one of these offensive comments was made.
Which is it senator? Are you just making this up as you go along?
Robert Ethan,
Where have you been all my life? Your eloquent well reasoned posts have made me see the world in a whole new light. Your wonderful use of caps - sheer genius!
Murray's reaction is interesting because it might indicate that a large segment of independents who think they're above 'race' but really aren't might actually break for Obama instead of McCain. He got them to think instead of react.
John Rich,
Did you actually watch the speech? Obama provided exactly what you claim he did not.
Jesse,
Pay attention. There's video evidence that Obama was not at the church when "God Damn America" was said. And you might consider watching Obama's speech rather than parroting Limbaugh's every uninformed utterance.
"how a bright man such as Obama could sit still through twenty years of Jeremiah Wright's blame America-blame whitey rhetoric."
Extrapolating two you-tubed sermons to twenty full years of inflammatory rhetoric is either stupid or dishonest. I doubt Wright damned America every Sunday, but neither of us know do we?
Saying that Obama should have left a church where such a sermon occurred is defensible in the facts. Inflating Wright to be a Black Panther every Sunday on scant evidence is simply wrong.
Oh, now I get it, Robert Ethan - you're just an ignorant racist. And here I was taking you seriously for a split second. Your reduction of the "left" into a series of super clever nicknames is amazing, though. I'd hate to match wits with you, with an arsenal of genius like that.
Or you can elect a president who is more adept at runnng from the law than the claim she can run the country.
I refuse to hear any more about how wonderfully experienced she is until she stops breaking the law. She has NOW just been the first
FIRST LADY
U.S. SENATOR &
PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE
to evade the Rule of Law! Add that to your resume!
Unbelievable!
Guilt by association isn't very American, in my opinion. Most people who make comments don't understand the black community and how very much the church means to their sense of community. Some of these people have little else to feel hopefull about - this is the south side of Chicago after all. A place with amoung the highest level of crime in the nation. Plus, if someone told you that you need to change your church of 25 years because your pastor/minister/etc said something controversial?More people including Obama should have spoken out about the language he was using and sooner. But, it is difficult to challenge such a figurehead of the community. Hopefully, Obama's words today do that. And put this unimportant issue to rest.
Guilt by association isn't very American, in my opinion. Most people who make comments don't understand the black community and how very much the church means to their sense of community. Some of these people have little else to feel hopefull about - this is the south side of Chicago after all. A place with amoung the highest level of crime in the nation. Plus, if someone told you that you need to change your church of 25 years because your pastor/minister/etc said something controversial?More people including Obama should have spoken out about the language he was using and sooner. But, it is difficult to challenge such a figurehead of the community. Hopefully, Obama's words today do that. And put this unimportant issue to rest.
John Rich doesn't have any black friends. I wonder why?
Is Chris Matthews the only man that has
an orgasm during an Obama rap session?
Just asking the rest of you male liberals.
Sorry. Posted the wrong link from AR earlier:
http://acropolisreview.com/2008/03/barack-obama-condemns-reverend-jeremiah.html
And James Watson is thinking what just now? Assuming he didn't suffer a concussion.
I am a racist.
It was, in many ways, a brilliantly written and delivered speech—something we've come to expect, of course, from Barack Obama. It did an excellent job of providing context for the black experience in America, explaining how the average African-American could gravitate to a controversial church like Jeremiah Wright's, and how those experiences might understandably be misunderstood by white America. It took a stab at uniting the black and white American experiences under the common problem of economic anxiety, brought on by the real enemy of working people in our country: unfettered corporate greed. In this regard, the speech still should have gone much further. More on that in a minute.
It was a brave speech. Barack Obama has been running as a post-racial candidate this entire election cycle. Today, he turned into the wind, and tackled the racial crimes, conundrums, and tragedies that have buffeted our nation since its inception. Obama challenged our country to deal with the race issue in the here and now, to no longer keep this conversation tucked away in our racially homogeneous tribes, where our separate white and black safety zones allow us to say what we really think about the other.
He did so knowing that after today, there is no going back. As an unnamed Obama adviser was quoted as saying, "Race is now officially on the table. It’s not going away after this,”. Race will be a part of his candidacy for the remainder of the primary, and, if he is so lucky, the general election. This is not something Obama wanted to happen, but at this point in the midst of the Wright controversy, it is obvious he felt he had little choice. Even braver, rather than offering banalities on unity and togetherness, he picked at some of the ugliest scabs in our national discourse, in effect claiming that his candidacy possesses the unifying power to do so without making the wounds worse.
That said, while I feel that the speech was a rhetorical victory, I am worried that in certain ways, it was a missed opportunity, and possibly a political failure.
The speech can be judged by who its intended audience was, and who it ended up becoming. His intended audience should have been the white blue collar males that, after the Virginia primary, were flooding towards his candidacy, but after Ohio, and Jeremiah Wright, have been flooding away from it.
Instead, the speech seemed more tailored towards the media, and Obama's base. Political journalists have swooned over it all day long. Chris Matthews probably had to change his pants twice on Hardball tonight, calling it "the greatest speech on civil rights in our nation's history".
It's a fine civil rights speech, and deserves much praise, but Barack Obama is not running to make a point, or win the argument about race in this country. He is not running for Civil Rights Leader of America. He is running for President of the United States. In a country with a still-white majority population, the two are unfortunately incompatible.
Fascinating frames like the following are crack for the media:
"I can no more disown him (Wright) than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."
Brilliant, honest, touching, hard-hitting stuff. But is it really helpful to his political prospects? I love the parallel. The entire blogging unit of The Huffington Post loves the parallel. His base of young white liberals and African-Americans loves it more than anyone.
But I've since heard more than a handful of other white folks—on both the left and right—say things like, "that wasn't a very nice thing to say about his poor old grandmother." Instead of getting the intent of the story—to remind people that Obama's experience is actually as a black and white man—a lot of white blue-collar folks hear that anecdote and think how rude it was for this young black man to say that about that poor old white woman. Plus, they're reminded about how they too, sometimes get scared around young black men. And soul-searching introspection on those feelings is likely not their next step.
As Obama himself said today, "I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own." So why is he attempting to do that very thing at its greatest crisis point?
I've even heard from some Democrats—yes, Democrats—who say maybe it was Obama's resentment of his white grandmother's attitudes towards blacks, that led him to a racially charged church like Jeremiah Wright's. I think such arguments are absurd and deeply narrow-minded. Unfortunately, so is the state of typical white racial thinking in this country.
What Obama also did not do with the speech was explain why he spent 20 years listening to a pastor condemn America, hate on white people, and spit on Israel. That's not what's really been happening the last 20 years in the Trinity Church of Christ, of course, but it effectively is what much of white America has come to believe.
Yes, Obama described Wright's outlook as "a profoundly distorted view of this country". And yes, Obama explained that Wright is more than the sum of these snippets of controversy: "The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor."
Fine. The retort I hear then is why does Wright say the U.S. government gave AIDS to black people?
What the speech really needed to do today was, at length, directly address the economic considerations from on high that have intentionally spurred the racial divisions in our country since the American Revolution. It needed to be, in many ways, his Howard Zinn speech.
It was good for Obama to start by empathizing with lower-income white Americans who feel robbed by affirmative action, who see no special value in their own white skin, who "don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race." But the argument stopped with empathy. It is absolutely critical that if you venture into why lower-income whites are resentful of affirmative action, you must complete the circle by explaining how our corrupt economic system requires whites to focus their anger on tiny programs like affirmative action, rather than the massive, non-racial corporate forces that are taking away black and white jobs, black and white health care, black and white homes.
The reason Obama must focus primarily on economics, rather than race, is that with two wars being fought abroad, a looming recession, a housing crisis, trade deals shipping our entire manufacturing base overseas, blue-collar white Democrats really don't feel the urgent need to solve this race problem in America. It is, unfortunately, probably the last issue on the plate—if it's even on the plate.
With one candidate focusing his attention on a controversial topic, which, though eloquently discussed, isn't at the top of voters' concerns, which other candidate is poised to jump right into an opening on the economy? Yep.
But, you say, Obama had to address this Wright controversy—it was eating his candidacy alive! I completely agree. The way in which I believe he would have been better served is by unifying the discussion of race more fully with the economic pressures that have caused these racial fractures in American life in the first place. It was still a brilliant speech. He has retaken the news cycle—no small feat after what he's been through the last couple of weeks. But it's just a news cycle, and the questions will continue to linger among lower-income white voters about Obama's racially questionable church-going.
It's not fair that Barack Obama should be judged by what Rev. Wright has occasionally said. But as life is not fair, many white voters still will do so.
He is still the front-runner for the nomination, and will still likely obtain it. The problem isn't with getting the nomination—it's how does he defeat a cultural icon like John McCain in the general election without grabbing a big share of independent white votes in swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Missouri.
His current base—young, affluent educated whites, and black voters—can't bring him over the finish line. And if he is ever going to silence the critics who say he is all hope and no results, he is going to have to throw some serious economic red meat on the table—sooner, rather than later. If he cannot get away from the race discussion, he must drag it over to the economic one.
I listened to Obama's speech for thirty-seven minutes. Does the man believe everyone is as gullibe and out of touch as he seemingly appears? He never once explained why he chose to remain in a church that vehemently preaches hatred. I find him to be an arrogrant hyprocrite and baltant liar. This man has no business as the democractic nominnee for president. Obama should be force to give up his candidacy. He is wrong for this country. If not, there will be more embarassment truths brought to light.
Barak Obama is a great speech deliverer.... I like Obama and wish every day that I can be compelled to give him my vote. However I am still waiting for explanations as to how he intents to deliver what he IS promising....All I am hearing are great one-liners. HE SEEMS TO BE NO DIFFERENT THAN THE REST OF POLITITIANS ....SAYING WHAT HE THINKS YOU WANT TO HEAR..GOD HELP US!
Barak Obama is a great speech deliverer.... I like Obama and wish every day that I can be compelled to give him my vote. However I am still waiting for explanations as to how he intents to deliver what he IS promising....All I am hearing are great one-liners. HE SEEMS TO BE NO DIFFERENT THAN THE REST OF POLITITIANS ....SAYING WHAT HE THINKS YOU WANT TO HEAR..GOD HELP US!
Barak Obama is a great speech deliverer.... I like Obama and wish every day that I can be compelled to give him my vote. However I am still waiting for explanations as to how he intents to deliver what he IS promising....All I am hearing are great one-liners. HE SEEMS TO BE NO DIFFERENT THAN THE REST OF POLITITIANS ....SAYING WHAT HE THINKS YOU WANT TO HEAR..GOD HELP US!
Barak Obama is a great speech deliverer.... I like Obama and wish every day that I can be compelled to give him my vote. However I am still waiting for explanations as to how he intents to deliver what he IS promising....All I am hearing are great one-liners. HE SEEMS TO BE NO DIFFERENT THAN THE REST OF POLITICIANS ....SAYING WHAT HE THINKS YOU WANT TO HEAR..GOD HELP US!
| 
No one ever questioned Obama's ability as a SPEECHMAKER.
The question revolves around the EXTREME DISCORD BETWEEN WHAT HE SAYS AND WHAT HE DOES.
Which basically is what the Clinton campaign has emphasized from the beginning. WORDS ARE WORTHLESS without the CHARACTER AND COMMITTMENT TO BACK THEM UP.
Obama has neither. He is a relentless LIAR and FRAUD.
Posted by robert ethan | March 18, 2008 1:40 PM