Obama Speech: Jeremiah Wright Is As Much A Part Of Me As My Grandmother
And thus he cannot disown him.
So, I guess erasing Wright from his campaign website and condemning (vehmently!) anything Wright said that might have offended you isn’t “disowning” him.
I’m sure the media will use this speech as an excuse to bring the Wright scandal to a close, but I still haven’t heard Obama answer this simple question: How could you sit in a church for 20 years where the reverend was damning America from the pulpit?
The statements from Rev. Wright are not controversial so much as they’re just plain wrong. HIV wasn’t a government plot. 9/11 wasn’t a government plot. This isn’t the “U.S. of KKK-A.” Yet Wright preached these things as if they were true and Obama sat and listened to him.
For twenty years.
I just don’t see how Obama can weasel his way out of that.
Update: All the ways Obama blew it according to Kevin Williamson at The Corner:
1. The Rev. Wright, he says, is like family to him—and not like the crazy uncle. Family like his mother and grandmother, he says. The Rev. Wright is a conspiracy kook and a racist. You don’t get to choose your family, unless you adopt. And Obama has just adopted the Rev. Wright.
2. Obama just went on a riff about all the complexities of race in America “that we’ve never really worked through.” The upshot: Let’s pick every scab off of every racial grievance in the history of the United States and “work through” those “complexities.” Let’s don’t. It doesn’t sound like a good idea, especially for the guy who was supposed to be the post-racial candidate. “Working through complexities” sounds like a trip to the marriage counselor to me. Obama is running for president of the government, not Redeemer-in-Chief.
3. Blaming black America’s problems on the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow isn’t going to cut it, especially if you don’t have some interesting, radical proposal to address those problems. But Obama has proven himself to be a more-of-the-same politician with a gift for oratory. He’s already backing away from his best proposal, i.e. letting poor families decide which schools will educate their children.
I think Obama’s speech will satisfy many in the media who, frankly, are in the tank for him and are looking for a way to move past this most inconvenient scandal…but I just don’t see it satisfying many American voters.
Update: The entire Obama speech is after the jump.
