🚀 go-pugleaf

He did it.

No other presidential candidate in the past 40 years has managed to
speak so much truth so eloquently at such a crucial juncture in his
campaign as Barack Obama did today. And he did it by speaking about
race, the most persistent source of hatred among us since America
began.

It turns out that a candidate for president with a white mother and a
black father has a capacity that no one else has ever had before: He
can articulate an equal understanding of black racism and white racism--
and that makes it possible for him to condemn both of them with equal
passion.

Ever since Rev. Jeremiah Wright's hateful sermons began to dominate
the cable-news airwaves a few days ago, Washington reporters and the
right-wing attack machine have been salivating at the chance to use
those words to destroy another promising candidate. But today, Obama
did what he does better than anyone else: He reminded America that we
can be, and we must be, better than that.
The truth is, for 40 years, it has been the Republicans who have used
prejudice of every kind against black people and gay people and
immigrant people to divide and conquer in November. And Obama did not
flinch from pointing that out. Instead, he looked the nation squarely
in the eye and declared, "Not this time!"

"Like the anger within the black community," he said, white
resentments "aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have
helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger
over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition.
Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral
ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire
careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate
discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political
correctness or reverse racism."

And right there, on MSNBC, was Pat Buchanan, the most prominent
example of this sorry class of citizen, who strained to put the worst
face on Obama's transcendent speech even as he acknowledged its
effectiveness. Only on cable television in America could a man who has
written that Adolf Hitler was "an individual of great courage," and
dismissed the idea that "white rule of a black majority is inherently
wrong" in South Africa--only on a cable news network could such a
person be allowed to attack someone else for failing to disassociate
himself sufficiently from another man's racist remarks.
But Obama was too courageous to bow to the chattering classes by
repudiating his former pastor altogether. Instead, he did something
much more difficult, and much more important: He offered a nuanced
view of his mentor's failings. "The profound mistake of Reverend
Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society,"
said Obama. "It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no
progress has been made; as if this country--a country that has made it
possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in
the land and build a coalition of white and black, Latino and Asian,
rich and poor, young and old--is still irrevocably bound to a tragic
past. But what we know--what we have seen--is that America can change.
That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved
gives us hope--the audacity to hope--for what we can and must achieve
tomorrow."

Sally Quinn was also on MSNBC today, and just as she was after Mitt
Romney's pathetic speech about religion a few months back, she was the
most intelligent commentator on TV. When Obama finished speaking, she
declared, "This may be hyperbole, but this may be the most important
speech about race since Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech."
It was not hyperbole.

If Obama is elected president, it will be because he has been the
first candidate in many years to try to appeal to what is best in
America: "What is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than
what all the world's great religions demand--that we do unto others as
we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother's keeper,
scripture tells us. Let us be our sister's keeper. Let us find that
common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect
that spirit as well." Unlike the approach of every Republican
candidate for president, that is a perfect example of the way religion
should be used in American politics.

In Obama's words today, you could hear the mystic chords of memory--an
echo of the words of another man from Illinois with humble origins who
understood the proper role of religion in politics. The spirit Obama
embodied today was the same one Abraham Lincoln evoked in the
peroration of his greatest speech in 1865:

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the
right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the
work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who
shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do
all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among
ourselves and with all nations."

http://www.radaronline.com/features/2008/03/obama_jeremiah_wright_full_court_press_01.php