Sen. Barack Obama’s failure to completely renounce the views of Rev. Jeremiah Wright has created a “Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa” issue for conservatives to latch on to in the general election and may end up putting another Republican in the White House.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m as liberal as the next Canadian sketch comedy aficionado, and I agree with most of Obama’s stances on the issues, which makes Obama’s affiliation with Wright even worse in my mind because it cedes power to the Republican party and Rupert Murdoch’s conservative lackeys.
When video surfaced of Wright, Obama’s preacher for over 20 years (Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope” is titled after a Wright sermon), asking God to “damn” America and positing ridiculous conspiracy theories over the pulpit, it severely tarnished the image of Obama as above the political muck.
Wright’s comments, which included blaming the American government for 9/11 and claiming the CIA invented AIDS, are both baseless and indicative of Wright’s ignorance and gullibility. I’ve heard people say that the government invented AIDS, but they were joking every time. One could tell that Wright was not joking.
As a sidebar, I want to tell everyone foolish enough to believe the U.S. government could orchestrate 9/11 that they are buying into a hack conspiracy theory. While the government’s actions after 9/11 have been deplorable and imperialistic, there is no way that the incompetent Bush administration could mastermind what would have to be the most well-executed plan in world history.
If Obama, in the press conference he called after the Wright scandal broke, had simply admitted fully his affiliation with Wright but denounced Wright as a moron, the issue would have been swept under the rug, and the pundits would have to find something else to spin.
But Obama didn’t do that. He resorted to political slithering by saying that while he went to church there for 20 years, he never heard Wright make these types of statements. He attempted to make the situation about the general issue of race relations in America irrelevant by spurning the typical cries of reverse discrimination by country-club racists from here to the Hamptons.
The way Obama handled the entire scandal has made him as divisive and despised by conservatives as Hillary Clinton, which is a distinction that allowed him to clean up delegates in caucus states and the South. It is because of Clinton’s ability to garner Republican ire that she probably couldn’t win against the candidate across the pond. After the Wright debacle, the same can probably be said about Obama.