Why Didn’t Obama Speak Out Sooner?
Whether or not McCain scolds the use of this tactic, we will most surely be subjected — between now and Nov. 4 — to repeated reminders of the Father Pfleger/Revered Wright diatribes.
And with each reminder of Pfleger/Wright, Obama’s boosters will defend the Senator with their own reminder: He does not share those views.
In turn, Obama’s detractors will respond with a question, the same question they’ve asked whenever this debate has been engaged: “But Why didn’t Obama speak out sooner? What didn’t he denounce the Pfleger/Wright mentality earlier, before he was running for President?”
And each time that question is raised, I think it should be the responsibility of all reasonable people — pro-Obama or not — to respond, without hesitation or equivocation: “He did.”
In the book he published 13 years ago, before any of us knew his name, before his political career started, before he was a state senator or U.S. Senator or presidential nominee, Obama denounced and rejected militant black ideology. Yes, he chose to live and walk daily among the contradicitions within the black community, but he made it very clear which views he accepted and which he most certainly did not.
Steven Waldman outlines the facts of the matter. [H/t Andrew Sullivan.]
Do what you wish with Waldman’s essy, but for my part, I’m bookmarking it, printing it, copying it, and wallpapering my office with it. I have a feeling I’ll need to refer others back to it … again … and again … and again.
9 Responses to “Why Didn’t Obama Speak Out Sooner?”
After reading all the comments under the linked article, it seems that there are lots of folks out there who will continue to have an ax to grind against Obama no matter what the facts really are.
Very well said.
Chris,
That proves a point I've had all along; most people who flog the Wright issue really just wanted an excuse to oppose Obama. They didn't like Obama and were never planning to vote for him. They don't really care about what Obama really thinks about Wright. What they care about is that they don't like Obama for some reason and will use anything as a fig leaf to express that dislike.
Thank you, Pete for inserting some sanity, truth, and two “pointers” into this mostly one-sided, twisted so-called debate that has been going on far too long.
A one-way, endless-loop of over-and-over repeated accusations against an American who happens to be black; who happens to have attended a certain church “for twenty years;” and who has the audacity to run for this nation's highest office. I have already linked to one of your pointers (Stevem Waldman), and will soon grab the second “pointer” out of my wife's hands, who has not been able to stop reading “Dreams from My Father.
All this time I have yet to read “Dreams from My Father.” Not sure why I put it off, but I'm going to read it now.
Answer: It didn't matter, and he wasn't caught, until now, when it counts.
Waldman's article just reiterates what Obama has been saying all along, if people would only listen: battle ideas without demonizing the people who believe them.
You know: hate the sin, not the sinner.
That was the essence of his speech on race.
That is the essence of his'change'.
What have people imagined he's been tlalking about?
Whatever it was, it didn't come from listening to him.
The willfully ignorant, though, likely will remain willfully ignorant.
They'll remain ignorant, or perversely defensive about what baggage of Obama's is exposed. Just let Obama and his team face it and address is and we'll judge both the baggage and how it is handled. The ignorant (and some of the more perverse, who actually laud what has been exposed, or want simply to attack those who expose it or criticize it) had already pre-decided by or before Super Tuesday.
“has the audacity to run for this nation's highest office”
You're inventing a conspiracy that doesn't exist (a la the far Left) if you believe this explains people's concerns and second thoughts about those associated with Obama who have made news during this election year. There is no institutional racism behind why people don't like far-left fringe offenses and why some of us wonder what we're in for if Obama is elected, as seems likely. (A colossal dinosaurish bureaucracy of Byzantine compexity that is especially dysfunctional, as we've seen in Illinois and Chicago? A bunch of inept activists who wreck things quickly or outrage 60 percent or more of the public in short order, or the likely takeover we anticipate by the Dem-DC machine who lets the far-left kids run wild but concentrates its agenda on rewarding special interest groups at the rest of our expense? It's not racist to want to know.)
Is Obama bringing in Eric Holder onto his VP search team? Holder is a notorious Dem activist-apparatchik from the Clinton years. It's not racist to note that. Et cetera.
(Let them undermine Nader fatally by choosing Claybrook for VP, and delight the activists, but at the risk of electing McCain.)
I think further comments exemplifiy perfectly the attitude of the willlufly deaf and ignorant.
Once having constructed an ill-informed internal narrative, that's all hey can hear.
No thunder clap of actual knowledge of facts or understanding is loud enough to break through that self-imposed isolation chamber of the brain.