Obama's Speech in Response to the Wright Controversy

You're certainly not the only one who feels this way -- he was no stranger to the Clinton White House.



Obama's speech was a solid start, but he will need to do a great deal more before this controversy is fully extinguished -- if that is even possible. Wright himself will need to step forward and present us with a better understanding of why he said what he said. Prior to this controversy he was a well known minister nationally -- America needs to hear more of his positive sermons to hopefully put the negative somewhat in context.

 

If Wright is Obama's "uncle", who is his "dad"? Based on what I read in the Chicago newspapers, his "dad" is Emil Jones, the President of Illinois State Senate. He was the power broker behind the success of Obama's State and US Senate runs. Just like any experienced politicians, he did many shady and questionable things. If some of these things get unearthed and they are related to Obama, then it will become another big negative.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article3602710.ece

Barack Obama: toxic mentors start to corrode pristine campaign
The Democrat was surging ahead but now revelations about the men who helped shape him are putting voters off

Long before Barack Obama launched his campaign for the White House, when he was considering a run for the US Senate in 2003, he paid an intriguing visit to a former Chicago sewers inspector who had risen to become one of the most influential African-American politicians in Illinois.

“You have the power to elect a US senator,” Obama told Emil Jones, Democratic leader of the Illinois state senate. Jones looked at the ambitious young man smiling before him and asked, teasingly: “Do you know anybody I could make a US senator?”

According to Jones, Obama replied: “Me.” It was his first, audacious step in a spectacular rise from the murky political backwaters of Springfield, the Illinois capital.

The exchange also sealed an intimate personal and political relationship that is likely to attract intense scrutiny amid the furore over Obama’s links to some of Chicago’s most controversial political and religious power brokers.

Obama has often described Jones as a key political mentor whose patronage was crucial to his early success in a state long dominated by near-feudal party political machines. Jones, 71, describes himself as Obama’s “godfather” and once said: “He feels like a son to me.”

Like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the outspoken pastor of Obama’s Chicago church, and like Tony Rezko, the millionaire fundraiser and former friend of Obama who is on trial for corruption, Jones is in danger of becoming a hindrance to his protégé’s presidential ambitions.


For almost a year Jones has used his position as leader of the state senate to block anticorruption legislation passed unanimously by the state’s lower house. He has also become embroiled in ethical controversies concerning his wife’s job and his stepson’s business.


None of them is linked to Obama, but the Democratic contender can ill afford another scandal related to his former Chicago allies. Despite his electrifying speech on race last week, the opinion polls make worrying reading for the senator and his aides. Hillary Clinton appears to be regaining lost ground and John McCain, the Arizona senator who has sewn up the Republican nomination, has edged ahead of his warring rivals.

When Obama stood before a row of American flags in Philadelphia on Tuesday, he faced the greatest challenge of his candidacy. His campaign was reeling from the potentially fatal fallout of Wright’s rabid videotaped sermons, in which the Chicago preacher exclaimed, “God damn America,” and said that the US government had invented Aids to infect black people.

Obama’s response was hailed as one of the bravest and most eloquent speeches on race delivered by an American politician. Even conservative commentators such as Charles Murray of National Review called it “flat-out brilliant”; Michael Gerson, former speechwriter to president George W Bush, called it “one of the finest political performances under pressure” since John F Kennedy addressed concerns about his Catholicism in 1960.

Other analysts, Democrat and Republican, took a different view of Obama’s refusal to turn his back on Wright – whom he portrayed as part of an embittered legacy of discrimination.

Some saw it as a potential gift both to Clinton, who has been surging in opinion polls since videos of Wright were posted on the internet, and to McCain, whose aides have begun to wonder whether Obama might prove an easier target than Clinton in November.

“Nothing could be more dangerous to Mr Obama’s aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday – for 20 years – in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable,” said Shelby Steele, a Stanford University historian and author of a book on Obama.

Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio talk-show foghorn, expressed the popular view more succinctly: “No country wants a president who is a member of a church with this kind of radicalism as its mainstream.”

The latest polls confirm that, for all the acclaim heaped on Obama’s speech by political insiders, voters seemed to be taking a sharp step back from the charismatic candidate who built his campaign on the promise of a break from “old politics”. One of Obama’s best-known slogans – and the title of his bestselling book – is “the audacity of hope”, a phrase that originally came from one of Wright’s sermons.

In Pennsylvania, the next big state to hold a primary, on April 22, Clinton has doubled her lead in the past two weeks and is now 26 points ahead. In North Carolina, which votes on May 6, Obama has been leading comfortably all year but is now only one point ahead. A national Gallup poll on Friday put Clinton ahead of Obama by two points for the first time since January.

Unfortunately for Democrats, their nomination battle seems to be helping McCain. The Republican rose to a eight-point lead over Obama and a 10-point lead over Clinton in Rasmussen tracking polls released on Friday.

Obama retains an almost insurmountable lead in the crucial count of convention delegates who will pick the Democratic nominee, and on Friday he picked up a useful endorsement from one of those delegates – Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, one of America’s leading Hispanic politicians. Richardson had been close to the Clintons and was regarded as a possible vice-presidential choice for Hillary. His first task will be to rally Hispanic voters in the hope of averting late primary losses that would damage Obama’s chances of picking up uncommitted party officials – the so-called superdelegates likely to decide the contest.

Other Democrats are worried that Obama may have given his Republican rivals the ammunition needed to undermine his campaign. McCain insists he will not engage in dirty tricks, and his aides distributed a memo last week warning Republicans to stay away from “overheated rhetoric and personal attacks”.

Yet Republican surrogates are drooling at the prospect of linking Obama to Wright’s rants.

They intend to ask why he has stopped wearing an American flag badge on his lapel, and why his wife, Michelle, said at a rally: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country.”

The Clinton camp is treading carefully, aware that overt attacks on Obama might alienate black voters. Yet the New York senator’s aides are quietly pleased by what they regard as an overdue scrutiny of Obama’s past. They believe he will come to be seen not as some Messiah but as an unusually gifted political hack who has made compromises with dodgy associates, just like most other American politicians.

That intensifying scrutiny may soon lead to Jones’s Illinois door, and to further uncomfortable insights into the unflattering political realities that accompanied Obama’s climb from obscurity.

At one point during Obama’s 2003 Senate campaign, Jones set out to woo two African-American politicians miffed by Obama’s presumption and ambition. One of them, Rickey “Hollywood” Hendon, a state senator, had scoffed that Obama was so ambitious he would run for “king of the world” if the position were vacant.


When Jones secured the two men’s support, Obama asked his mentor how he had pulled it off. “I made them an offer,” Jones said in mock-mafioso style. “And you don’t want to know.”


Jones is now at the centre of a long row over his attempt to block proposed laws cracking down on his state’s “pay-to-play” tradition – whereby companies hoping to win government contracts have to contribute to the campaign funds of officials.

Jones’s staff say he blocked the bill because he intends to produce something tougher. No proposals have appeared.

Cynthia Canary, an activist against corruption who is fighting to have the laws passed, says Obama had little choice as an Illinois politician but to deal with an ethically dubious regime. “You hold your nose and work through the system,” she said.


Yet she also thinks America is being done a disservice by those who portray Obama as somehow above the uglier wheeler-dealing of politics. “He’s a pragmatic politician, and in the end if you think that he’s superman, your heart is going to get broken.”

 

He was talking about what the blacks want to hear. This plays well in the primary stage because blacks has a bigger say in the Democratic Party.

It is a gamble either way but he chose to play the safe one by placing the bet on the African Americans. This doesn't hurt him much now but it will hurt him more in the general.

 

You missed one thing. He also put his two kids in the church to listen to Wright's stuff.

 

Sorry, this post is out of place in this thread.

 

I don't think anyone would guess that blacks want to hear that whites are understandably upset over what they see as unfairness from affirmative action, and some of the other concerns dealing with race that he brought up from the white perspective.

If you think his speech only addressed concerns of blacks then you may want to go back and listen to it again. Because his speech went way beyond that.

 

I think you missed the point instead. The main point of his speech is to change the topic (A favorite tactic of Obama and his supporters btw).

Instead of talking about Wright, he talked about race (actually just the black-white struggle) in the bigger context. By changing the topic, he doesn't need to repudiate Wright. By doing this, he is pandering to the African Americans IMHO.

 

He did talk about Wright, and mentioned that what Wright said was wrong. He made no bones about saying that what Wright said was offensive.

But he also went into more depth about the underlying race issue. He did so not just from a perspective of blacks are getting a bad deal and being discriminated against, he ALSO talked about where some of the resentment from some whites come from, and talked about those issues from a perspective of whites.

He did repudiate Wright's words very clearly. He didn't change the topic just delved further into it.

 

No thanks. The less this moron talks the better. His voice has to be one of the most annoying things I have ever heard.

 

Glenn Greenwald writes well...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/03/23/race/index.html

(Link only because of language and a bunch of embedded links.)

 

He already has 90% of the African American vote - why would he need to pander to them?

 

Ron Paul brought up similar points in his campaign and he was fairly harshly criticized by McCain and Giuliani but I think it never became much of an issue because Paul's campaign wasn't considered as a serious threat to the Republican front runners. As for the specific topic that has been debated quite a bit even here on CF.net and in other circles.

 

If he turns his back from Wright, he will be accused as not black enough. As a result, he will lose black votes.

Judging from the demographics of remaining states, he found that he still can't win Hillary's states even if he goes the other way. He concluded that the best move is to play it safe such that he can keep North Carolina in his column.

 

He repudiated Wright's words on Friday already.

The only thing new about this speech is that he admitted he did hear about Wright's speech at the church. Unfortunately he didn't make a light apology for this lie during the speech.

If he didn't change topic, he should go into specific instances in the past that made Wright what he is. But he didn't do that, he was talking about the general black history to excuse Wright.

 

The sense of threatened tribalism is at the root of movement conservatism, and always has been.

 

Obama's first statement said he didn't hear the inflammatory America speech, but the later statements was that he has heard other inflammatory speeches before. Subtle difference, but no lie.

It does open the door for earnest journalists to prod into what inflammatory speeches in particular that Obama heard.

So you talk about throwing people under the bus, but you demand Obama going into specifics that Wright himself has the right to address?

Why are you so focused upon purifying the sins of Rev. Wright when it's been acknowledged that other churches, black and white, have employed inflammatory rhetoric in their sermons? Do you think the greater issue will vanish if Obama did condemn the man?

Let's cut to the chase...What are you getting at with Obama's judgement and decision making wrt Rev. Wright?

 

I'm not sure how saying that he disagreed with the things that Wright said, and dismissing Wright from the campaign, is excusing Wright.

 

I agree.

I have issues with the message of Jeremiah Wright. I don't agree with a lot he has to say. I would prefer politics not be spoken from the pulpit.

I am a Christian, and when I sit in church, I want to experience the word of Jesus, not the political beliefs of my pastor. I want to hear love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and temperance. The words I have heard from Rev. Wright are not consistent with the fruits of the holy spirit. I think some of Rev. Wright's words fuel anger, not love.

I also acknowledge that Rev. Wright has suffered under racism. I acknowledge that his perceptions of America are different than mine, and because of his experiences, he has less trust in America than I do. Like Mike Huckabee, I think people need to examine Rev. Wright's words as a product of his entire life. Not excuse his words, not accept his words, but try to understand how he came to believe like he does. Try to understand the problem that causes people to feel this way.

There is a problem with racism in this country, no, this world. That is a fact. The color of someones skin creates a first impression. It shouldn't. I am guily of that, and I think everyone is. It shames me.

With regards to Obama, I tend to disagree with some of his political views. But, I also see him as a leader. A man who has a command of the language and a presence that makes people listen, even when they don't want to. His words can reach all races, and he has the chance to work against the racism that has developed in this country. To me, that is more important than the differences we have in our political beliefs.