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April 30, 2008

How dumb does Obama think we are?

Ed Lasky
Barack Obama has a pattern of dealing with political problems by denial. He denies that this person or that person is his foreign policy adviser;  he denied a close relationship with Pastor Jeremiah Wright, yesterday -- he called  Wright just his "pastor".

Clearly the relationship is much broader and deeper than Obama is lately representing. In other words, when people become a political problem for Barack Obama, he distances himself from them, redefines their role, throws them down a "memory hole" or throws them under the bus.

A new kind of politician? Me thinks not.

Quote from Obama regarding Pastor Jeremiah Wright 

"He was never my ‘spiritual advisor... He was never my spiritual mentor; he was my pastor." 

Obama suddenly objects to Wright being called his "spiritual mentor".

Those exact two words in that sequence may never have come from Obama but certainly the relationship is more significant than Obama lets on.

For example, what are we to make of this Chicago Sun-Times article? [emphases added]

"These days, he says, he attends the 11 a.m. Sunday service at Trinity in the Brainerd neighborhood every week - or at least as many weeks as he is able. His pastor, Wright, has become a close confidant.


"Another person Obama says he seeks out for spiritual counsel is state Sen. James Meeks, who is also the pastor of Chicago's Salem Baptist Church. The day after Obama won the primary in March, he stopped by Salem for Wednesday-night Bible study."

More from the Jim Geraghty at the National Review:


The Rolling Stone profile that persuaded Obama to disinvite Wright from that announcement:

This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr. Wright is not an incidental figure in Obama's life, or his politics. The senator "affirmed" his Christian faith in this church; he uses Wright as a "sounding board" to "make sure I'm not losing myself in the hype and hoopla." Both the title of Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope, and the theme for his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 come from Wright's sermons. "If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from," says the Rev. Jim Wallis, a leader of the religious left, "just look at Jeremiah Wright."

Obama wasn't born into Wright's world. His parents were atheists, an African bureaucrat and a white grad student, Jerry Falwell's nightmare vision of secular liberals come to life. Obama could have picked any church - the spare, spiritual places in Hyde Park, the awesome pomp and procession of the cathedrals downtown. He could have picked a mosque, for that matter, or even a synagogue. Obama chose Trinity United. He picked Jeremiah Wright. Obama writes in his autobiography that on the day he chose this church, he felt the spirit of black memory and history moving through Wright, and "felt for the first time how that spirit carried within it, nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams."

Obama has now spent two years in the Senate and written two books about himself, both remarkably frank: There is a desire to own his story, to be both his own Boswell and his own investigative reporter. When you read his autobiography, the surprising thing - for such a measured politician - is the depth of radical feeling that seeps through, the amount of Jeremiah Wright that's packed in there.

But he was on Obama's spiritual advisory committee as recently as March. Wright has since left that position.  


Jim Lindgren at  Volokh Conspiracy has a superb post today regarding the question of how Obama has defined Pastor Wright in the past. . He notes Obama has called him his close confidant [see the Chicago Sun-Times article mentioned above]; notes that Obama was taken with Wright's worldview; reports that Obama called Wright his "friend and mentor". A newspaper article in Lindgren's post stated that Obama counts the Reverend (Wright) "among his spiritual advisers".

Lindgren might also have included these characterizations made by or of Obama in the past:

Wright is my "sounding board" and keeps my "moral compass" calibrated: 

If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from just look at Jeremiah Wright.

His campaign told the New York Times that Obama is proud of his pastor and church:

Furthermore, how likely is it that Barack Obama never heard the litany of curses and rants of Pastor Wright's? He stated in the Sun-Times article that he attended Trinity Church every week (with an occasional absence). He has been juggling multiple versions of stories regarding his knowledge of Obama's incendiary sermons.  In a March 14th posting at the Huffington Post he wrote:

'[T]he sermons I heard him preach always related to our obligation to love God and one another, to work on behalf of the poor, and to seek justice at every turn.'

However, at other times, he admits to having heard controversial remarks from Wright (though he refuses to say what they were). He disinvited Wright from being on stage with him when he announced his candidacy for President, telling Wright that he "can get kind of rough in sermons".

The audacity of deception. Does Barack Obama hold the voters in such contempt that he believes we are so dumb that we cannot see the obfuscation at work?

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