Obama has a record as president and can be challenged on that record. Raising Wright now would have been a serious miscalculation and would have been interpreted as attempting to inspire racial animus.
The bit about inspiring racial animus is interesting because, as Paul Mirengoff points out at Power Line,
...there is nothing inherently racial about bringing up the fact that Rev. Wright served as Obama’s spiritual adviser, while denouncing America, hating on Israel, and embracing Louis Farrakhan. Any candidate (of any race) who was closely associated with any minister (of any race) who delivered hateful, anti-American sermons would be expected to answer for it.
Sure Wright and Farrakhan are Black, but that doesn’t give them a pass for their racism and anti-Americanism. By the same token, the fact that Obama is Black doesn’t excuse him for selecting Wright as his spiritual leader. There were many other black clerics Obama could have looked to for guidance. He chose the Black liberationist who spews a message of hate.
If it wasn’t racist for Obama eventually to disavow Wright, it isn’t racist to hold him accountable for being so tight with Wright for so long.
It was Barack Obama himself who privately disavowed Jeremiah Wright, and who publicly proclaimed that he could no more disown Wright than he could disown his own grandmother. The vices exhibited by Wright would still be vices no matter the color of Wright's skin. Here is one example to show the wrongheaded arguments by those who would claim racism: What if the roles had been reversed and it had been John McCain's pastor who said the things Wright had said?
No comments:
Post a Comment