I went into 2008 thinking that two expected things might not happen as planned: that Hillary Clinton would not be nominated for president by the Democratic Party, and that the Summer Olympics would not actually held in China. It's turning out that I'll probably be wrong on both counts, but there's elements of both situations upon which to hang my hat.
Regarding Clinton, it's pretty obvious that her fellow Democrats are not terribly enamored of her. She's behind in delegates to a one-term senator who speaks well but turns into a standard liberal in those rare instances when he speaks substantively. Really, if the party had anyone to offer at all, he or she would have the nomination easily in hand by now. Al Gore, for example, would have been planning for November a month ago. But he's not in the race.
Instead, it's Barack Obama who is giving Clinton fits, and just two weeks ago I would have said that my no-Hillary notion was correct. Political conditions can change dramatically in a half-month, however, and they appear to have done so in the race for the Democratic nomination.
I think Obama could have made it past the NAFTA flap and survived the Tony Rezko scandal. But the controversy over his pastor for 20 years, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, dooms his candidacy. There is no way Obama will become president of the United States in 2008. Maybe in a future election, when some distance of years is put between the two, and the Illinois senator can prove over time that his views and the pastor's are indeed different, maybe he'll be welcomed back.
I won't bore you with reminders of what Wright said. You've read them or heard them. You can avoid them. Obama can't, no matter how hard he tries.
The problem is that Obama's attempts to explain away his association with the Rev. Wright flies in the face of common sense, our normal life experiences. People who've been church, synagogue or mosque shopping, say after moving to a new town or souring on the place they had attended, know that Obama is full of it when it comes to his pastor.
Okay, you're in a new town. You go to churches near your neighborhood, which fit your taste between modern or traditional services, and have congregations full of people you like. That's all well and good. But if you don't agree with what the preacher says, you don't stick around. The minister is in many instances a make-or-break factor in whether you stay at that house of worship. The pastor can be a fine man, but if you don't see close to eye-to-eye with his interpretation of the Bible, Torah, or Koran, you're out of there. It's just the way it is.
One Easter, my wife and I went to her mother's church, which was not too far from where we lived. Our normal church, that we liked, was quite far away, so the relative proximity of this place offered some hope as an alternative for us. The pastor, on a day of celebration for Christians, delivered an incredibly poorly timed fire-and-brimstone sermon that literally shocked the heck out of me. Let's just say, we never went back while he was there.
If Barack Obama disagreed with what the Rev. Wright was saying -- over 20 years! -- he would have left. So maybe he wasn't in attendance for the 9/11 speech. He would have heard about it. Congregations have a way of communicating, and sermon remarks are probably the number one topic. I doubt that the Rev. Wright limited such talk to just one or two sermons when the future senator just happened to be out of town.
Let's face it. We've seen now, between the Rev. Wright and Tony Revko, the environment from which Barack Obama came. He will NOT become president of the United States this year.
---
The church comments have been great fodder for newspapers and, especially, conservative talking heads. Whether they mean much to Democrats, I'm not sure. Exit polls show that it's the educated wine-and-cheese non-church-going crowd that supports Obama. These are people who were daily fed similar comments by their college professors and came to agree with them.
While I think Democrats will realize Obama can no longer win and reluctantly nominate Clinton, I could be wrong.
---
As for China, there's really not a lot that can be done regarding their repression of Tibet. It's a decades-long thing. It's far away, China has us over a barrel financially, and we have more pressing matters to deal with.
If the Tibetan protests, and the bloody response by Chinese authorities, continue toward summer, will the United States and Europe be strong enough to pull their teams out of the Olympics, like they did for the Moscow games of 1980 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a year earlier? I doubt it.
Even if the show does go on, it will be tainted. The cloud over Beijing won't just be smog.
