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WASHINGTON - Even if Hillary Rodham Clinton and her aides do not mention Barack Obama's fiery-tongued spiritual mentor, don't expect the Illinois senator's well-publicized speech Tuesday to make the controversy disappear, political strategists said this week. Reporters, talk-show hosts and others will keep asking about Obama's close and long-standing relationship to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose most bombastic comments came to dominate the Democratic presidential contest recently, the strategists predicted in interviews. In video clips playing on Internet sites, Wright can be heard arguing that HIV-AIDS was a U.S. government plot to wipe out "people of color," and that God...

An interesting photo has surfaced (h/t Drudge): That's the Rev. Jeremiah Wright grippin' and grinnin' with President Bill Clinton on September 11th, 1998, at a meeting of various clerics where Clinton gave his "I have sinned" speech following the Lewinsky affair. I guess Rev. Wright didn't consider an invitation to the White House as "being treated the same way Clinton treated Lewinsky", to quote the good Reverend. The same day this photo popped up, the story leaked out that the Clintons are shopping the Rev. Wright controversy around to superdelegates in the hopes of getting them to abandon Obama While...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Democrat Barack Obama suffered in the polls Thursday after a much-acclaimed speech on race that, pundits said, had failed to defuse voters' anger over rage-filled sermons by his former pastor. Waging an acrimonious battle against Hillary Clinton for the Democrats' White House nomination, Obama confessed to being bruised by the controversy surrounding his longtime Chicago preacher, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. "In some ways this controversy has actually shaken me up a little bit and gotten me back into remembering that, you know, the odds of me getting elected have always been lower than some of the other conventional...

For most white folks, indignation just doesn't wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot. Indignation doesn't work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country--the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples--we are...

Barack Obama delivered a speech on March 18th, just days after the firestorm created by the release of tapes in which his Pastor Jeremiah Wright repeatedly made the most incendiary anti-American statements. So to diffuse the issue he endeavored to deliver a speech on race relations in America. The problem with this speech was that the anger that Jeremiah Wright provoked in patriotic Americans had nothing to do with race. He filled his speech with platitudes about race relations, which while they may be true, have nothing to do with why people are angry. People were not deeply offended by...

There was a time when patriotism and an outsize love of country was a given in anyone running for president of the United States. Not any more. Barack Obama and his wife have demonstrated that being black means never having to say you’re sorry about your — or your fellow blacks’ — conditional love for America. At two Wisconsin rallies last month, Michelle Obama declared, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.” For such transparent civic disdain, a white candidate’s wife would have been made to crawl over broken glass to beg forgiveness,...

There's a new entry next to Mika Brzezinski's name in the annals of MSM elitism. The Morning Joe panelist today lamented blue-collar whites who "can't hear" the message Barack Obama propounded. Poor benighted souls. Joe Scarborough called Mika on it. Brzezinski's comment came in response to Scarborough's exposition of why he didn't think Obama's speech would work with many blue-collar whites. View video here.

Obama's Speech by Thomas Sowell Wednesday, March 19, 2008 Did Senator Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia convince people that he is still a viable candidate to be President of the United States, despite the adverse reactions to statements by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright? The polls and the primaries will answer that question. The great unasked question for Senator Obama is the question that was asked about President Nixon during the Watergate scandal; What did he know and when did he know it? Although Senator Obama would now have us believe that he is shocked, shocked, at what Jeremiah Wright said,...

Forget the Straight Talk Express. Barack Obama’s campaign has the biggest bus in this presidential campaign and yesterday he threw everybody under it. Even his grandmother. As a former speechwriter myself, I was looking forward to Obama’s remarks yesterday because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how anyone could talk themselves out of Obama’s predicament. How does Obama - the Kumbaya Candidate - explain his 20 years at the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s black power church? How does a uniter spend every Sunday in the pews where anti-white, anti-Semitic and anti-American conspiracies and kookery are preached on a...

Barack Obama had been a presidential candidate for more than a year before he outright repudiated his long-time pastor for racially charged, anti-U.S. sermons. But when talk show host Don Imus was in hot water 11 months ago for racially insensitive comments, Obama was the first candidate to call for his firing. When asked about the different responses to his pastor and to Imus, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor questioned the premise of the comparison and defended Obama’s response in each case. “He spoke out both times, so it’s entirely consistent,” he told FOXNews.com Tuesday. Obama — who in a major...

Bill Clinton, once hailed as America’s “first black president,” has been disavowed by a once adoring black community. Geraldine Ferraro has been accused of being a secret racist. Oprah Winfrey is labeled a feminist sell-out. The major campaigns eagerly pander to racial and socioeconomic groups, and try different combinations of divide and conquer strategies. Black Americans are for Obama, and overwhelmingly admit that it’s a vote based on race, women are for Clinton and overwhelmingly admit that it’s a vote on gender. The two campaigns eagerly fight to curry favor with Hispanics. The wealthy are targeted for income redistribution, the...

Just as Sen. Barack Obama sought to distance himself from controversial racial remarks made by his pastor, an anti-American government, anti-white and virally anti-Semitic black supremacist party has endorsed the presidential candidate on Obama's own website. "Obama will stir the 'Melting Pot' into a better 'Molten America,'" states an endorsement from the New Black Panther Party, or NBPP, which is a registered team member and blogger on Obama's "MyObama" campaign website. The NBPP is a controversial black extremist party whose leaders are notorious for their racist statements and for leading anti-white activism. Malik Zulu Shabazz, NBPP national chairman, who has...

AFRICAN AMERICANS, INDEPENDENTS, DEMOCRATS, REPUBLICANS COMPLETELY AGREE, COMPLETELY DISAGREE... Looking at the reaction of a MediaCurves focus group of 709 viewers to Sen. Barack Obama's race speech in which he took on the issue of his controversial pastor, Rev. Jeremiah C. Wright, it's once again interesting to see the racial divide in how the speech was received. It's the same racial split Obama so deftly described in his speech. Blacks who took part of the survey had higher levels of agreement with Obama than non-blacks. And Democrats had more favorable impressions of the snippets of the speech they were shown...

Did Senator Barack Obama’s speech in Philadelphia convince people that he is still a viable candidate to be President of the United States, despite the adverse reactions to statements by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright? The polls and the primaries will answer that question.

Imagine in 1999, that a videotape had come to light showing the pastor of Texas Gov. George W. Bush's church making vicious, hateful comments about America and cruel, racist statements about Americans of color. Suppose this preacher had given a lifetime achievement award to former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and had traveled to Europe with Duke to meet with neo-Nazi terrorists. Now try to envision that the candidate's family had attended this church for more than twenty years, that George and Laura Bush had been married there, by this pastor, and that the Bush daughters had been baptized...

Election '08: Rather than break ties with his demagogic, anti-American pastor, Barack Obama used a speech on race to excuse his behavior and sweep the controversy under the rug. Passing the buck is not very presidential. Speaking in Philadelphia, steps away from where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were enacted, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president delivered an address that used the words "race" or "races" 11 times, "racial" or "racially" 15 times, and "racism" or "racist" six times. But Obama's recent troubles, which this much-hyped speech was supposed to put past him, are not about...

Barack Obama—the self-anointed soul-fixing, nation-healing political Messiah—has lost his glow. That is the takeaway from the beleaguered Democratic presidential candidate’s “major” speech in Philadelphia yesterday.

It is a major scandal that threatens to derail Barack Obama's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, but the mainstream media is treating it as a minor political scuffle, says Fox's Bill O'Reilly. In his talking points memo Monday night, O'Reilly played tapes of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright's (Obama's former pastor's) rants against the United States and then said that all clear-thinking Americans including Sen. Obama are appalled by what he called "those hateful words." Noting that Obama said that the picture being painted of Wright is not accurate, O'Reilly wanted to know what about it was inaccurate and...

Barack Obama — the self-anointed soul-fixing, nation-healing political Messiah — has lost his glow. That is the take-away from the beleaguered Democratic presidential candidate's "major" speech in Philadelphia yesterday. For all of his supposedly unique and transcendent understanding of race in America, Obama's talk amounted to the same old, same old. The Glowbama mystique has gone the way of the Emperor's clothes. Instead of accountability, we got excuses. Instead of disavowal of demagoguery, we got whacked with the moral equivalence card. Instead of rejecting the Blame America mantra of left-wing black nationalism, we got more Blame Whitey. Same old, same...