I wouldn't say he handled it "perfectly". He threw his own grandmother, who helped raise him, under the bus in a national speech merely to personalize an inapt analogy.
If this is Obama's new kind of politics, I'll take the old kind and be glad of it. Ruthlessness to enemies in politics I can understand; but to your own family?
The Grandmother in his speech is a different one from his book, apparently. She was afraid of one particular black man on a bus. Obama threw granma from the train because it was expedient to do so. The bigoted white woman who raised a black kid. What a cretin.
Posted at 2008-03-28 07:13:04 [PermaLink]Obama is a Cook County (i.e. Chicago) pol. In fact, the majority of his popular vote lead over Clinton is attributable to Cook County.
The notion that he's some kind of new politician is laughable. You'd think his relationship with Rezko would have clued people in by now.
Sadly, I have to agree with you.
As Jeremy Thorpe said of Harold MacMillan, who kicked a lot of his erstwhile pals out of Cabinet in what has been called the "Night of the Long Knives," a move to shore up his crumbling political position, "Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life."
Handled it perfectly?
How bizarre. He didn't explain why he sat at the feet of a raving nutcase for 20 years, and he humiliated the grandmother who raised him by giving a different description of her actions than were described in his own book.
And of course he is dropping like a stone in the polls so he has to separate himself further from Wright.
So, handled perfectly?
No. He gave a rollicking speech that wooed the gullible with empty rhetoric.
All politicians lie; the tricky bit is not getting caught.
Posted at 2008-03-28 10:53:05 [PermaLink]What kind of parent is Obama if he would take his own children to hear a hate filled idiot like Wright?
It doesn't sound like he believes much of the hope and change mantra if he exposes his own kids to that garbage.
I don't see how wallowing in hate and self pity and victim hood is much of a change.
BO handled it as he has handled everything else in this campaign - through mellifluous, vacuous intonations that never address the root of the problem. As I have posted elsewhere, he will be a trivial pursuit question 15 years from now - nothing more.
J.C. Watts for JM's VP!!
"It doesn't sound like he believes much of the hope and change mantra if he exposes his own kids to that garbage."
People need to be far more skeptical than they have been of Obama's disavowal of the good reverend's hate-America monologues. I suspect Obama is considerably more troubled by the damage Wright's sermons have caused him politically, than he is by their content.
Obama has held high level political office for several years, and harboured higher aspirations even longer. Members of his inner circle would long ago have been well aware of Obama's world, and more importantly, Obama would know where Wright and others close to him stood in terms of ideology. Obama is now suggesting a gross incompatibility exists between his value system and that of Wright. I find that very hard to believe, given the nature and length of their relationship.
Obama's denials and weaseling very much remind me of Michaelle Jean's response to the public airing of the old video of her and her husband partying with a who's who of Quebec separatists.
I'm convinced there are people who know Barack Obama has a much lower opinion of his country than he pubicly professes. I'm equally convinced that the now bus-flattened Jeremy Wright is one of those people.