BETRAYAL

Most of our friends on the left and a few on the right are discouraged. It is not Hillary. Hillary is simply being Hillary. The fact that she recently added to her long list of constructs yet another fiction - that she was under fire when disembarking in Bosnia in 1996 when in fact she sauntered off the plane and stopped on the tarmac to listen to a little girl read her a poem - is old hat for most of her fans; as Carl Berstein noted recently, "She has always had a difficult relationship with the truth." No, it is in fact Obama whose cross-racial and cross-partisan supporters believed that he was a new-era politician, one not defined by the grievances and habits of an earlier generation, a post-racial leader who could bring us all together but who now appears, sub-surface, to be altogether someone else.

Among those who hoped this guy was genuine are intellectually honest black Americans like Shelby Steele who in a recent editorial in the WSJ worried about Obama’s revelation that he sat Sunday after Sunday for 20 years in a church whose pastor spewed venom at everything American. "Facts are stubborn things," John Adams reminds us. Obama, Steele says, "fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgement is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?" "What was Obama thinking?," Steel asks. And the answer: "Of course he wasn’t thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to ‘be black’ despite his biracial background," and a little race hatred was the compromise because from Rev Wright and others like him there is the mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one’s blackness, an apparent fit for Obama.

We also hear from Thomas Sowell, another black American and an economist at the Hoover Institute whose wisdom and courage have inspired many of us over the years. From Sowell: "Obama didn’t just happen to encounter Wright, who just happened to say some way out things; Wright is in the same mold as the kinds of people Obama began seeking out in college - members of the left, anti-American counter-culture. In college, ‘I chose my friends carefully,’ he said in his first book, Dreams From My Father. These friends included ‘Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets’ — in Obama’s own words — as well as the ‘more politically active black students.’ He later visited a former member of the terrorist Weatherman Underground who endorsed him when he ran for state senator."

Nor has Obama changed in recent years. His voting record in the Senate is the furthest left of any senator, and perfectly consistent with the far-left ideology and the grievance culture, just as his wife’s statement that she was never proud of her country is consistent with that ideology. Never did he try to educate himself on the views of people on the other end of the political spectrum, much less reach out to them. As Sowell notes, "He reached out from the left to the far left. That brings us together?"

To help explain away some of this Obama gave a speech the other day in Philadelphia. He made a statement on racial matters, answering a question that no one was asking. That speech warmed the hearts of the NYT’s staff and Harvard Review but insulted the intelligence of everyone else. If your topic is race, meaning blacks, then let’s discuss subjects ranging from disproportionate illegitimacy and drug usage to higher-that-average criminality to disturbing values espoused in rap music, and unaddressed anti-Semitism. (To most, racism is such a distant memory that racial victimologists like the Rev Wright are now left with concocting wild-eyed conspiracy theories to maintain their power. It is self-serving black "leaders" like Wright and Jackson and other race baiters who act as though the legacy of slavery gives black people like them the right to be permanently ill-mannered, and who through their racial identity politics have blocked advancement more than racism every could.) But key is that Obama dodged the question that everyone is asking - why did he spend 20 years listening to Wright and never say a word? There was no apology, no tough stance on Wright. If you seek to be president, you better damn well repudiate any clown who blames us for 9/11, who claims the US invented AIDS as a way to kill people.

The masquerade is that Obama’s sudden rise to leading Democratic contender has required him to project an entirely different image and persona. The ease with which he has accomplished this chameleon-like change and entranced both whites and blacks is a tribute to the man’s talent, yet a warning about his credibility. His run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. He flatters whites; as Steele explains, "he grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude."

And so now, from some of those who had hope for this man we actually hear accusations of dissembling. And why not? Obama told the Chicago Sun-Times, "I’ll be honest with you. I wasn’t in church when any of those sermons were issued....I had not heard him make what I consider to be objectionable remarks from the pulpit." Yet in the speech itself, Obama declared, "Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church?" Yes." But for Obama to now claim that Wright’s obscene views come as a shock is a fabrication.. To deflect, Obama cowardly compares Wright’s invective to his own grandmother ("a typical white person") who he claims, "..once confessed her fear of black men who passed her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." My, my. His own grandmother, who cooked his food and tucked him in at night and paid for his private school - has expressed the same feeling about black men as Jesse Jackson. He had no excuses for his grandma though. She never felt discrimination, doesn’t get the same pass as his "old uncle" Rev Wright.

Obama, a phony?

Robert Craven