Charen: Grandma Got Run Over by a Campaign Speech

NRO ^ | 3-21-08 | Mona Charen

[cgk]

March 21, 2008, 0:00 a.m.

Grandma Got Run Over By a Campaign Speech
The road to universal love is paved with cheap shots.

By Mona Charen

It’s a mistake to try to pigeonhole Barack Obama. He is too smart and too agile to succumb to easy categorization. But the candidate’s eloquence is often more of a curtain than a window to his soul — and one is left to wonder where his heart truly lies. As George Burns said of acting, “Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

Discussing his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who asked God to “damn” America, who called this country the “No. 1 killer in the world,” Obama’s defense was subtle. Oh yes, he agreed, the rhetoric is “divisive … at a time when we need unity” and reflects “profoundly distorted views of this country” that “rightly offend both white and black.” But there’s so much more to the man. He serves his community, housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, serving those with HIV/AIDS, and so forth. He brought Obama to Christianity. And Obama can no more “disown him than he can disown the black community” and no more disown him than he can disown his own white grandmother.

Obama’s white grandmother, according to the account in Dreams from My Father, had once flinched before a black man on a public bus — hoping that her husband would drive her to work the following day so that she could avoid him. On other occasions, he recounts, she had uttered “racial or ethnic stereotypes” that made Obama “cringe.”

This is a false equivalence. In the first place, what pastor or congregational leader does not minister to the poor and unfortunate? Pastoral work in the community is the norm, not the exception. One can say the same of Louis Farrakhan and Hamas for that matter. It doesn’t begin to excuse or justify stoking the flames of hatred and bitterness that Wright so flagrantly fired.

And wasn’t it a bit of a cheap shot to take public aim at grandmother, who sacrificed so much for Obama, who served as his surrogate mother during his high school years? If she used racial and ethnic stereotypes, that was wrong. But the episode about the bus, as related in his book, is hardly a damning indictment of a secret racist. After Obama’s grandmother confessed to having been harassed by an aggressive panhandler, Obama writes:

“He (Obama’s grandfather) turned around and I saw now that he was shaking. ‘It is a big deal. It’s a big deal to me. She’s been bothered by men before. You know why she’s so scared this time? I’ll tell you why. Before you came in she told me the fella was black.’ He whispered the word. ‘That’s the real reason she’s bothered. And I just don’t think that’s right.’

“It was like a fist to my stomach, and I wobbled to maintain my composure.”

I don’t claim to know Obama’s grandmother and am in no position to judge her racial sentiments. But it does seem to an outsider that Obama’s judgment upon his grandmother is as harsh as his tolerance of Wright is benign. It isn’t as if he was raised in Trinity Baptist Church. He chose it as an adult. He chose those sermons he now calls “incendiary” and “inexcusable.” He says now that Wright misses the dynamism of American society, yet when it came time to decide where his daughters would attend church, he chose Trinity, where they would “learn” that the U.S. government concocted the AIDS virus to wipe out the African-American population, that the U.S. would “plant” WMDs in Iraq, and that blacks harming other blacks are “fighting the wrong enemy.” A beautifully delivered speech cannot overcome that history.

The solution, Obama asserts, to racial divisiveness, is to come together and say “Not this time.” This time “we want to talk about “the crumbling schools ... to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem.” This time, in other words, we can demonstrate our racial bona fides by, you guessed it, voting for Obama for president.

Barack is the new kid on the block, but surely he can recall the campaign of 2000. One of the candidates that year made education reform a keystone of his effort, more or less explicitly aiming at minority kids. He called his package No Child Left Behind and denounced the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” One doesn’t expect Obama, a very liberal Democrat, to endorse George W. Bush’s programs. But it would be nice if he were not suggesting that by voting for something very similar, we are taking a bold step toward racial reconciliation and universal love.

© 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

[paudio]

Tuition for the 2007-2008 school year for Grades K-12 is $15,725.

Punahou is the most prestigious elite private school in HI. To put it in perspective, the tuition for undergrad at the University of Hawaii per semester for 12 credits is $3,129 (for HI residence).

[scrabblehack]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Colson

Did Hunter Thompson merely write (for rhetorical effect) that Charles Colson would walk over his own grandmother if necessary (and Colson didn’t actually say it)??

[Cicero]

You can buy the mug on Amazon.

[newheart]

What me typical?

[timer]

In the end time many false christs shall arise, deceiving great numbers of people, obama is one of them...

[winner3000]

Hezbollah also hides behind “good social works” work performing terrorist acts.

[freespirited]

He is too smart and too agile to succumb to easy categorization

I am so tired of hearing this kind of stuff. Like many others, Mona is confusing his eloquence with unusually high intelligence.

Certainly Obama is smart. But brilliant he is not. Just look at all the illogical things he says.

He is easily categorized. Significantly above average intelligence, with a bias toward verbal ability.

[smalltownslick]

EVERY woman has flinched when strange men get too close, stare, or in some way make them uncomfortable.

Isn’t that the truth??? As one who moved to the South less than 10 years ago, I still deal with this nutty phenomenon - for some reason, redneck guys just can’t stop themselves from stopping and offering a ride to any woman they see walking down the street. (As if it’s somehow not acceptable to walk down the street!) In their world, they think they are being nice, caring Southern men. But, good grief, DO THEY NOT KNOW THAT WOMEN ARE CONSTANTLY INSTRUCTED NEVER to accept a ride or get involved with a total stranger?? It’s a cultural divide, but you would think by now they would have figured it out. It’s a line not to be crossed. We are strangers - don’t offer me a ride. Ande leave me alone, cause I am about to get nasty with you for violating my space.

[colorado tanker]

She was in front on Tuesday when he initially gave the speech.

He flew her in to do that to her???

[skr]

Exactly!

[Godwin1]

Our man Obama: has belonged to a racist America hating church for 20 years; brings his innocent children to that church so that their minds might be poisoned with lies and hatred; chooses a life partner who was not proud of America; stabs his own grandmother in the back, ruining her reputation for political advantage.
He has no character. A media creation. I wouldn't want to sit next to this guy on a bus, let alone elect him president.

[Godwin1]

Actually, in Obama’s tale, his grandma was hassled at the bus stop, not on the bus. She gave the panhandler a dollar but he was aggressively demanding more when the bus came and she was able to board it. Obama’s doesn't say, but apparently his grandma was alone at the bus stop and there were no other pedestrians nearby. The story came up because she asked grandpa to give her a lift to work the next morning. She did not want to wait alone at that bus stop again. Can anyone but a race-hustling demagogue blame her? Did this make her the moral equivalent of the venomous, frothing-at-the-mouth, racist Wright?

[samtheman]

when it came time to decide where his daughters would attend church, he chose Trinity, where they would “learn” that the U.S. government concocted the AIDS virus to wipe out the African-American population, that the U.S. would “plant” WMDs in Iraq, and that blacks harming other blacks are “fighting the wrong enemy.”

Not just an unfit candidate. Obama is an unfit parent.

Worse then Michael Jackson dangling his baby from the balcony.

[silverleaf]

It’s less about tuition (which is heavily subsidized by trust funds set up for native Hawaiians) than it is about who gets in-—check it out further

Especially check it out during the time Obama was a student there and Asians were being excluded by designed admissions discrimination

[bboop]

That’s right. It’s actually called Being Aware of Your Surroundings. Using common sense to keep yourself safe — now that is suspect too? And it shows that you are a racist?

Well, I grew up in Los Angeles and it is STUPID not to be aware of — panhandlers, traffic, men of any race who swagger and look like they are up to no good, etc. and etc.

What’s moral about Code White? About assuming that everyone is of good moral character? That is just denial and naivete. No thank you.

[Gritty]

[The Forgotten Man]

What I meant was she was in front of the bus on Tuesday and behind it on Thursday....

[RobRoy]

Obama was on Mercer Island at around that time, IIRC. When we lived on Mercer Island, my wife called the school busses twinkies: yellow on the outside with a rich white filling.