She praised it, but had a lot to say about his inclusion of her on the same continuum with Rev. Wright—and on his implication that the impetus for Ferraro herself to resign from Senator Clinton's campaign didn't originate in pressure from Obama's camp. Because, of course, it did.

What surprises me is that—given (1) the fact that it appears to underscore his own hypocrisy, and (2) the fact that Ferraro is a free agent now, no longer restricted by being linked to Clinton's campaign—Obama chose to bring Ferraro back into this mess. As Ed Morrissey points out at Hot Air, this issue "isn't going away." Why borrow trouble in this way, given everything else that the Obama campaign has on its plate?

It's just odd.

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She has more patience than I, and has witnessed more overt racism than I have ever seen.

Maybe even, "a wild patience."

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Well, of course my memory of the Watts riots is a bit hazy; after all, I was only three years old when they erupted.

Mostly I'm thinking of the Rodney King riots, and The Riots That Didn't Happen—after the O.J. Simpson verdict. Ace ran a clip last night of the Reginald Denny beating, and just seeing it alluded to brought back a lot of memories. (I think the video has since been taken down—but that's okay. Those days—and the television footage thereof—are seared, seared into my memory.)

During disasters‐natural and man-made—I watch a lot of television, which is different from my normal M.O. (Generally it's difficult for me to remember what day of the week it is, and therefore whether there's something on that I like—furthermore, my time management skills don't allow me to go find a television in time to see what I might actually want to look at. Also, I'm not a channel-surfer: I hate seeing little chunks of television- and movie-salad. Plus, the television is on my husband's side of the house. Okay, okay: I just don't have the self-discipline and attention span that television-watching requires. Are you happy?)

I watched TV during the riots in 1992, and after the earthquake in 1993. I did the same thing most of the day on 9/11. It messed with my sense of time. (Attila the Hub informs me that I was the one who coined the term "riot potatoes" to describe our actions—or lack thereof—after the Rodney King verdicts.)

After The Riots That Weren't (post-O.J. verdict), I didn't watch television. But I remembered us being prepared for "civil unrest" beforehand. I know I went to my mother's house and made her accept one of my guns (she subsequently kept it, the dirty little thief).

But what distinguished the Rodney King riots from the O.J. Simpson verdict non-riots was what happened to race consciousness during the King riots: Outside of South Central, Hollywood, Koreatown, and the other affected areas, the races actually drew closer together in some communities. I waited in line for an hour to buy groceries near my boyfriend's apartment in Glendale—we were preparing to hunker down for a kind of seige—and there were certainly black people in line. We all talked about how horrible it was that it was all happening, and how we hoped it would be quiet, finally, that night.

A black friend of mine talked about growing up in Pacoima, in a rough part of town. His neighborhood was so bad that he and his friends once found a dead body in the trash dumpster. "I never rioted," he declared indignantly. That's how most black people felt. Remember?

So on a weird level, despite the burning and looting and horrific loss of life, the King riots didn't make me feel like I was living in a black-and-white world. They seemed, instead, to open farther the chasm between, as Dennis Prager puts his own dividing line for the human race, "the decent and the indecent."

After the O.J. Simpson verdict, though, I remember walking around and looking at all the black people smiling and honking their horns at each other, and thinking that they all appeared delighted about women getting their heads nearly sliced off, as long as those women happened to be white. It took Rush Limbaugh to put it all into perspective, and to tell his white listeners that the celebrations among African-Americans weren't as they appeared to us—rather, people were happy that, for once in a case that carried a certain level of notoriety, a black man benefited from the legal presumption of innocence in this country. That made me feel a lot better.

But I, for the record, don't think we needed a "national conversation on race." What we need is transcendence. What we need is to cultivate our ability to look at people as individuals, rather than as skin on some kind of goddamned global Pantone Matching System.

What we need is the thing Obama suggested early on in his primary campaign he just might be able to bring to the table—the thing that, despite my disagreements with him on economic issues, filled me with an odd sort of excitement: a sense that history might finally become history, after all. That we had a chance of acquiring to do that skill with race in this country that we have with religion, for the most part—a knack for putting it aside in the public sphere. Not denying it; acknowledging it and getting on with life. Looking at the bigger picture.

And that is the one thing Barack Obama cannot do for this country. The more he opens his mouth, the more any a American's essence appears to be summoned up in how easily he or she can get a freakin' suntan.

That isn't my vision for this country. Is it yours?

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Obama's "race relations" speech, that is. Krauthammer in WaPo:

Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign. Then answer this, Senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?

Noonan, WSJ:

The Obamas, he and she, may not actually know all that much about America. They are bright, accomplished, decent, they know all about the yuppie experience, the buppie experience, Ivy League ways, networking. But they bring along with all this -- perhaps defensively, to keep their ideological views from being refuted by the evidence of their own lives, or so as not to be embarrassed about how nice fame, success, and power are -- habitual reversions to how tough it is to be in America, and to be black in America, and how everyone since the Reagan days has been dying of nothing to eat, and of exploding untreated diseases. America is always coming to them on crutches.

But most people didn't experience the past 25 years that way. Because it wasn't that way. Do the Obamas know it?

This is a lot of baggage to bring into the Executive Mansion.

Still, it was a good speech, and a serious one. I don't know if it will help him. We're in uncharted territory. We've never had a major-party presidential front-runner who is black, or rather black and white, who has given such an address. We don't know if more voters will be alienated by Mr. Wright than will be impressed by the speech about Mr. Wright. We don't know if voters will welcome a meditation on race. My sense: The speech will be labeled by history as the speech that saved a candidacy or the speech that helped do it in. I hope the former.

Is that because she loves to hear Faulkner quoted, and loves it when a speech is given in "paragraphs" rather than sound-bites, or is it because she so loathes the candidacy of Hillary Clinton?

I respect Noonan, though—and if I can steal some time away from houseselling/househunting, I'll re-read the Obama speech.

That's a big "if," of course . . .

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. . . get along?

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But it's not like the candidates' teams had access to FBI files.

Well, not most of 'em, anyway . . .

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. . . there's still a little magic in the air; I'll weave my spell say farewell.

(With hearty apologies to Queen, the band that transcended prog-rock.)

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Dan Collins remarks on some juicy, jaw-dropping quotations from The Greenwald Gang (aren't they triplets? quadruplets? quintuplets? I don't know, frankly, how many of 'em there are).

Bottom line: some people actually bought the Obama speech. Like, really.

Collins to Greenwald, who felt that those who criticized Obama were engaging in a "double standard":

You give hypocrites a bad name.

Yup.

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1 Good ol' American partisanship. One side is always terrible. Blah blah. But your still cool Attila Girl! Look, I bought Obama's speech. Doesn't mean I'm voting for him (I'm a black independent voter who's always voted third party to protest the Big 2). I bought it because it was one of the most rational speeches on racism I've seen. And he acknowledge white resentment very, very well. The speech stands on it's on and puts the man, Senator Obama, on a different level regarding racial dialog. Regardless if he wins or not (he won't get the nomination IMHO).

Posted by: T-Steel at March 19, 2008 05:41 AM (YvBPe)

2 But what was needed wasn't a discussion of racism—or, for crying out loud, white "resentment"; what was needed was a discussion of why he's been going to that hateful church for all these years and subjecting his girls to "information" that was inflammatory and factually wrong.

Posted by: Attila Girl at March 19, 2008 08:42 AM (Hgnbj)

3 Is it an apples/oranges thing to compare Wright's rhetoric with statements by people like Falwell, Hagee, Robertson and others who blame America for 9/11, Katrina and other disasters? See, the problem is I may not be nodding my head in agreement when they say New Orleans was flooded or the World Trade towers were hit because of the immorality of this country, but I do understand where they're coming from. And even if I disagree, I may not be wishing to loudly condemn and distance myself from them (any more than I already have distanced myself from the social conservatives). I keep reading and reading on this whole imbroglio, and I can't seem to get myself exercised about it to the degree that I am exercised about Obama's essentially communist/socialist underpinnings. To me, all this yak about race is serving to obscure the fact that this country could be taking a gut-wrenching lurch leftward if he were to be elected.

Posted by: Desert Cat at March 19, 2008 01:10 PM (B2X7i)

4 I, too, regret that this election is starting to boil down to race, and that the most salient feature of a candidate is starting to be the color of his/her skin. And it is not apples and oranges. I know where you're coming from inasmuch as you and are both libertarians with SoCon streaks (yours, of course, a good deal larger than mine . . .). But I have condemned the Falwell and Robertson statements. At the same time I defend expressions of faith in the "public square," I resist vigorously any sort of "one size fits all" spiritual solution for this country. That isn't what we're about. I know you're saying that the Wright thing was just rhetorical excess, but I see it differently: I think the factual wrongness of his statements, combined with the degree of hate they were likely to stir up, made them very dangerous. When you factor in that gullible black people sometimes fall for that stuff (AIDS as an agent of white genocide, etc.), I just cannot stomach that in a Presidential candidate. I think the Obama is, sub rosa, trying to take the position that "there is no such thing as black racism." And I reject that position, just like I reject the man-hating elements of feminism, lesbian separatism, and all the rest of it. Divisiveness serves no one.

Posted by: Attila Girl at March 19, 2008 03:39 PM (Hgnbj)

5 I think gays at least, might be disinclined to agree that Wright's rhetoric is more dangerous than some of the rhetoric of the religious right. I mean you have to admit that some of us Bible-thumping redneck hicks might actually fall for the notion that faggots are an abomination before the Lord. Or something.

Posted by: Desert Cat at March 19, 2008 04:47 PM (B2X7i)

6 You can't go to a church for twenty some years and turn around and condemn it. We don't have a choice about the religion we are given, just like we do not have a choice about our racist heritage or our name or the color of our skin (except Mr. Jackson). Obama did the right thing, he put the "wright" in its place. I mean I disagree with most of what my religion says. I even resent how others who are non-believers misinterpret my religion. Getting back to the point, this will cost Obama dearly, but in the long run that is Good for America, to put down a person and make them guilty by association is precisely what we want to see in this countries politics. That will make him a political martyr, and that in a Christian land is always a good thing.

Posted by: azmat Hussain at March 19, 2008 07:25 PM (+fapf)

7 DC--You might want to talk to Gay Patriot West about how accepting lefties are vs. Christians . . . contra Andrew Sullivan, most centrist/war-supporting gays get much more love from the right vs. the left. Azmat--He may not have chosen Christianity, though according to the doctrine I follow one must do precisely that. He did, however, choose the particular local church he joined, and pastoral leadership had to feed into that decision.

Posted by: Attila Girl at March 19, 2008 07:30 PM (Hgnbj)

8 Well partly I'm talking perception. Obviously the gays on the right side of politics have figured out somewhere along the line that most of us are not actually itching for a lynching. And I'm not really trying to draw an equivalence here, just noting that some of the huffing on our side looks a little over the top if we take a moment to consider how some of our stuff might look to the left.

Posted by: Desert Cat at March 19, 2008 08:29 PM (DIr0W)

9 BTW there's something wrong with the comments link on your top two posts. It gives me a 404 error when I click. It is probably for the best. Darrell and I would doubtless be at each other's throats within the span of a couple comments, given the subject matter.

Posted by: Desert Cat at March 19, 2008 08:31 PM (DIr0W)

10 A crack is a crack. No way to "prove" its cause. "It's natural settling," I would say. "For Nature, it's a good thing. . . Nature always settles." Of course I would gently clean out the crack and fill it with a specialty concrete crack filler (usually sold in a half-gallon size milk carton container. It adheres well, is super-fine in texture, and can be feather-edged and still remain crack-free. Try Sears. Paint afterwards. Then you won't have to explain.

Posted by: Darrell at March 19, 2008 09:04 PM (y+l1q)

11 Do I know how to lay down bait for you guys, or what?

Posted by: Attila Girl at March 20, 2008 08:40 AM (Hgnbj)

12 We're like helpless monkeys caught in your spell. Or carp, to go with your metaphor. I explain cracks in concrete walls by saying that I got mad once and punched it. "You wouldn't want to see me mad. So are you guys buying or what?"

Posted by: Darrell at March 20, 2008 10:27 AM (wKw5e)

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So, Barack Obama cannot disassociate himself from his racist pastor, but has no trouble insulting his still-living grandmother. Nice.

I mean, I do have one racist grandparent, but (1) he didn't raise me; (2) he was as mean to me as he was to everyone else; (3) he isn't alive anymore, and (4) I don't talk about him that much. ("Chilipods, chilipods, chilipods!"; "Grandpa, do they speak a lot of Spanish where you are now?" That would tell me what I'd like to know.)

But: Obama's grandmother is afraid of black men who pass her on the street? Hell: everyone is afraid of black men who pass them on the street. I got mugged twice trying to pretend I wasn't afraid of black men passing me on the street. Jesse freakin' Jackson has admitted that he's afraid of black men passing him on the street. That's racism? I thought it was the survival instinct. Some people call it "street smarts," which means that there's a whole different set of rules for vetting people you might pass on a sidewalk, versus those you meet in the grocery store, or a bar, or a friend's living room.

This guy's sleaze factor is kind of rising, here. I'd almost prefer a straight shooter, like Senator Clinton. After all, there are things she just won't do for the sake of gaining power. Not many, but they do exist.

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. . . is kind of a living document.

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. . . if Obama is such an "agent of change," why he didn't have the courage to stand up to his own pastor, and implies that the reality behind the Obama-Wright relationship is more like: Obama never really minded the hate-talk and the wild untruths until he got caught—which Gingrich likens to being "a normal politician."

Ouch.

Gingrich suggests that this will "slow the momentum" of Obama's campaign. I think it'll bring the whole thing nearly to a halt.

Barack Obama had two decades in which to have a "Sistah Soljah" moment. He declined to do so, and would now like to retroactively pretend that the whole issue never came to light.

"There used to be white racists in the past, and there probably still are, and so it's okay to support black racists in the present. Oh, look over there!—it's a shiny object! Look at the sky! Look at the trees! Looking at the water rippling on the edge of the lake; isn't it pretty?

He's finished.

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It's a multifacted entry that's impossible to summarize. As usual, Joyner talks about the moral dimensions of the issue, the rhetorical devices Obama used, and the way this "Wright Stuff" stuff may affect public opinion/the horse races.

There is also, as one might expect from James, a nice little roundup at the end.

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Those of you who are still supporting Barack Obama (and I know you are lurking around), please go over to Ace's place and check out this video.

You don't have to read the post itself (sorry, Ace), and you probably shouldn't read the comments there.

But just deal with it, please. I truly want to see how you're wrapping your heads around this.

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and, of course, how they apply to Barack Obama.

I asked her about my rather confused white-girl thoughts here. So it's nice to see the concept expanded upon. I think it's also a nice thought process for young minorities to go through (or, ahem, anyone who might be tempted to slide into the culture of victimhood): how do you create a self that neither varnishes the past, nor wallows in it? Flight, or fight? Is there a middle way?

Maybe we all need to learn from Steele's "maskless black person." At least, when we wear our various masks, we ought to try to be aware of it.

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Karl at Protein Wisdom:

white Americans, who are fully aware that historically black church services may include dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting — just as some predominantly white churches do. What distinguished Trinity was the hateful and paranoid comments of the Rev. Wright and the apparently joyful reaction of his congregation to them. Indeed, Tom Maguire notes that after the speech, MSNBC presented black ministers who insisted that Wright is way out of the mainstream, and that most black churches preach a more traditional Christian message of love. That Obama insists on claiming Wright is like part of his family whom he cannot disown, when he self-evidently chose the association — and that he compares Wright to “the entire black community” tells Obama’s audience much more about Obama than about Wright or the black community.

Karl has also, in the post linked above, researched Liberation Theology in general, and Black Liberation Theology in particular, comparing it to other strains within Christianity and discussing Rev. Wright's teachings thereon.

I'd read it now if it weren't time for my "daily stint" of housecleaning/de-cluttering. So it'll have to wait tonight—but it's fairly thorough (in an introductory sort of way, natch), and it should make juicy reading tonight with my glass of red wine.

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Or David Duke, for that matter. Barack Obama, on why it's okay to hang out with racists.

Uh-huh. If people buy this, I'm going to be pretty annoyed.

UPDATE: Baldilocks has a nice roundup, including a link to the smartest man alive ("my other political father," she calls him), Professor Thomas Sowell, writing in National Review Online:

Neither Barack Obama nor his media spinmeisters can put this story behind him with some facile election-year rhetoric. If Senator Obama wants to run with the rabbits and hunt with the hounds, then at least let the rabbits and the hounds know that.

Racist.

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in the Wall Street Journal:

Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.

This is how Mr. Obama has turned his blackness into his great political advantage, and also into a kind of personal charisma.

And:

And yet, in the end, Barack Obama's candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton's or Jesse Jackson's. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were "challengers," not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin.

I'm not sure that any black person who is working toward a color-blind society is a "bargainer," or that any black person who discusses race is a "challenger." I almost wonder whether Steele is boxing black behavior in unnecessarily this way. I don't know.

But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don't know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . ." And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama's Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a "blank screen."

Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political 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. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America").

How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background.

Which is the crux of it. Read the whole thing.

I do not know how the Democrats intend to engineer a win for Clinton, but if they are smart they are working hard to change the rules. Because they cannot win with Obama.

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So, Barack Obama is a beautiful blank canvas.

Which would make him a lot like that other brilliant politician of our age—what was his name? Ah, yes: Bill Clinton.

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The guy wears earplugs to church. Or he's got his iPod going during long sermons. If he ever "nodded," it was just because there was a good beat in the music. Nice baseline; good drumming. That kind of thing.

Just because someone is sitting in a pew, doesn't mean he or she is actually listening to what is being said from the pulpit.

Besides: Racists!

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I don't know whether the Democratic Party can or will nominate someone for whom their members will actually vote.

I just don't think Barack Obama is that person, though Senator Clinton still could be.

Whom does this benefit? Well, it starts with a "John," and it ends with a "McCain."

Via InstaPUNDIT.

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