Posted on 03/20/2008 11:33:52 AM PDT by .cnI redruM
According to Former French President Jacques Chirac, Senator Barack Obama had a wonderful opportunity in his hands after his stem-winder regarding the Le Affair Jeremiah Wright. He could have zipped his soup cooler for a week and let the media go print salacious details of New York Governor David Diggler-Paterson’s extracurricular activities. He didn’t and he just might have taken Bill Buckner off the hook for the worst error to be run on SportsCenter many years later.
When a candidate gives a high-profile, dangerous political speech, that candidate should never seek to clarify much of anything. A lot of times, you don’t want your political opponents to actually get it. They’ll make a point of getting it up on You-Tube ASAP.
When asked why he made reference to his grandmother, he should have lied further. It’s the truth and the sordid details of the candidate’s inner beliefs that put the bastard sword through feel good talk of hope and change. Obama could have said his grandmother was the perfect example. Instead, he said she was typical.
His actual words were the following.
"The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity, but that she is a typical white person. If she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know (pause) there's a reaction in her that doesn't go away and it comes out in the wrong way."
We all do our best. We try to make those allowances. But what can you do. She’s one of them.
And what exactly did Grandma do that made Barack have to be so understanding and indulgent of her pseudo-sapient status? Here is the damning bill of particulars in the Senator’s own words.
“a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
Fellow Chicagoan, Reverend Jesse Jackson offered similar observations once in 1993. He confessed grief over the fact that he could hear a stranger approach him on the street from behind and feel relief from anxiety when he ascertained that the individual was white. I doubt the Reverend, who spent much of the 1960’s helping Martin Luther King Jr. march for civil rights, was indulging any contextual reference-based conditioned racism.
During the First Gulf War, Former Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder gave a speech which presaged Jackson’s remarks in 1993. Wilder pointed out American soldiers in Kuwait were in less actuarial mortal danger than children walking on the streets of African-American neighborhoods of Richmond, Virginia at night. In fairness to black Richmonders, it wouldn’t be too much wiser to go for an evening stroll through Oregon Hill.
What the examples provided by Jackson and Wilder go to show is that Barack Obama’s grandmother was typical of far more than just a white misconception. If she was guilty of anything, it was that she believed what she saw on the local TV news.
President George W. Bush used to hector us about a concept known as “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” This involved any type of thought pattern or statement that went along the lines of “Wow, that was really bright. When you consider the author was one of them.”
Perhaps Barack Obama is absolutely not the right messenger of American racial reconciliation. Perhaps he is too caught up playing the identity politics game that has plagued his party of choice. What I hope he learns the hard way from this is that typical is really stereotypical. In a society that really healed all of its racial divisions, there would be no such thing as a typical American.
But... but...
He’s Clean and Articulate!
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