Michael Barone touches on what really offends conservatives about Obama’s choice of church.
Readers of Obama’s gracefully written autobiography, “Dreams of My Father,” have been surprised to find that it is the story of a young man who wants to embrace rather than transcend his blackness. Joining Wright’s church was part of that embrace.
That a young man that was raised by his white mother and white grandparents would betray his inner white oreo stuffing for his outer black cookie crust, is something suspicious and intolerable. It’s as if he deliberately set out to make things hard for himself just so he could have something to complain about. But, why complain when he had that nice Ivy League education?
And observers of Obama’s political career will note that joining that church gave Obama political connections in the all-black South Side that he lacked as guy who arrived in Chicago from Columbia and Harvard Law, and gravitated to the mostly white university community in Hyde Park. The 76 percent black state Senate seat he won in 1996 (after getting his opponents’ names removed from the ballot) included Hyde Park, but most of its voters were on the all-black South Side.
His decision to embrace Christianity and to join Rev. Wright’s church must have been nothing more than pure political calculation. This is the argument that the right is making. Obama is a traitor to his race who could have been white, but chose to be black. And his choice to be black was politically motivated. And now it is Obama, not anyone from the Clinton campaign or anyone on talk radio or cable news or the print punditry, that is shoving his cynical black identity into our faces and trying to make white people feel guilty for the sins of their fathers.
Barone goes on to suggest two seemingly mutally exclusive things. First, that Obama is trying to be the voice of a new black generation, and then that the new generation will reject him for trying to represent them.
Obama portrays Wright as the voice of black America for one generation, one generation that is pretty much on the way out, and himself as the voice of black Americans and of all Americans for a new generation…
… A newspaper story on Obama’s pastor is not going to affect [Millenials’] view of him — they don’t read newspapers except when a friend emails a link to a newspaper Website. A YouTube video is another thing. The Wright videos — angry when Obama is soothing, racially divisive when Obama is inclusive, anti-American when Obama proclaims a new generation’s version of patriotism — are something else…
…The hypothesis forms that he has been losing to some extent the support and to a more important extent the enthusiasm of Millennial voters.
Barone conveniently ignores the ridiculously huge popularity of the YouTube of Barack Obama’s speech on race. He does so because he is a typical conservative commentator who is not at all interested in the merit (only the partisan effectiveness) of what he is saying.
The Millenial generation is instinctively attracted to Barack Obama and his message. They are not turned off by Rev. Wright’s speech; they are turned off by people that would use Obama’s race against him. If Michael Barone were to go out in the streets and talk to voters, he would realize that young voters don’t need any convincing on Barack Obama. Seven…eight times out of ten, young voters are already sold on Obama’s campaign and turned off by the media’s and the Clintons’ racial politics. They don’t want to get beyond racial politics…they already are beyond them.
Where Obama is being hurt is among older white voters. His biggest loss of support is among older white voters that have been ethnically or religiously discriminated against in this country. Go into any Italian, Polish, or Irish neighborhood and see how they have received the news about Pastor Wright. It isn’t pretty. Obama is now seen as just another urban black pol that acts like the only discrimination suffered in this country was suffered by blacks, and that whites (regardless of class, ethnicity, or religion) have all been keeping them down.
But, then, that was the whole point of repeatedly injecting race and racial stereotypes into this nominating process. If the Clintons could make Obama just another black pol, he would drop down into the low 30’s in support among whites in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky. The Republicans will try to do the same thing.
It’s good that this all came out now, after Obama wrapped up the nomination, because it gives him a chance to push through it and makes the same charges less potent in the fall. Barone concludes:
So is Obama a transcendent leader or just another politician? Millennials who have fervently believed he is the first may, after watching Wright on YouTube, wonder whether they have been wrong.
My own answer is: both. He embraced Wright for 20 years, out of something like idealism, and got something out of it. Now he is making a generational pivot away from him, with notes of idealism, and is getting something out of that, too. I’ll be watching the Millennials in the next exit poll. I suspect that Democratic super-delegates will be, too.
Perhaps the most depressing part of all of this is to watch otherwise good people sitting on the sidelines with bags of popcorn, watching to see how effective the racial attacks are…never once condemning the racial attacks. Add Michael Barone to a group that already included the Clintons and their whole campaign team.
