When you're not what you present yourself to be, no one likes you anymore. Just ask Eliot Spitzer, Barack Obama or anyone who works on Wall Street.
-- Spitzer came off as a warrior against corporate and public -- but mainly corporate -- corruption, and got caught with his hand in the cookie jar in his use of high-priced prostitutes. Everyone afraid to speak out against "the steamroller" before didn't hesitate to say what they thought of the man. What's worse, public embarrassment or learning just much everyone hates you?
-- Obama was the white knight who would ride into Washington, D.C., and change the bad ways that things are done and unite the country. Now we learn that he's a product of the most corrupt political system in the United States and embraced a racially divisive preacher with an extreme hatred of white America. His favorable ratings have slipped below 50 percent in the past few days for the first time.
-- "Things are fine, things are fine" we kept hearing from the financial companies as we slipped toward recession in recent months. Now we discover that things indeed are fine, except with the financial companies, and the reason the economy as a whole is weak is because those firms are dragging everyone else down with them. If you toss the financial sector out, the stock market is not doing all that badly. Investors lost millions with last week's near-failure of Bear Stearns. Now investor confidence is said to be at a seven-year low.
The snippets above are classic examples of why we're in desperate need of a change in our national leadership. Spitzer, Obama and the financial executives all hoped that we'd turn our backs and not take notice of certain things. But when you're a public figure, you can only hide the dark side of your life for so long. It will eventually come out, and it did for all of them.
While Spitzer is likely to have his name become a verb, Obama could suffer even worse in public opinion unless he comes clean real fast. His recent efforts at excuse-making have not just been weak, but dug his hole deeper. A lot of us invested a lot of hope that he could be the one who would go to Washington and run the country in a better way than it was operated before. His betrayal, therefore, cuts far deeper than Spitzer's.
---
In some ways, I'm glad for what's happened to Obama's candidacy in recent weeks, because it might pull us back from the brink of a horrible break in relations between the races in this country.
Obama's campaign started as non-racial and inspirational, which is why Geraldine Ferraro was right to a degree with her controversial statements. Unfortunately, the Clintons have done everything to turn this into a race-based campaign and they've succeeded. Every so often, whether with the Ferraro comments or the Barack "Hussein" Obama references, they remind us that he is a black man.
Exit polling shows that black voters are now backing Obama by a 9-to-1 ratio and Clinton, while losing overall, is now winning decisively with white voters. Obama now carries the hopes of black America that he can become the first president with their skin color.
The worry has been that Clinton was going to find a way to steal the nomination for Obama, either by manipulating the superdelegates or primary rules. Just how black Americans would react to being ripped off in this way is uncertain. I'm not going to sit here and demean anyone by predicting riots or something. Might happen. Might not.
Whatever happens, it would be terribly sad for a presidential campaign that promised to bring the races together to end in a way that would tear us apart. Maybe we're lucky with Obama's struggles over the Rev. Wright, Tony Rezko and NAFTA. Those are legitimate issues that tell us about the man who would lead us. If those subjects are what sinks his candidacy, it would be better than a simple racial divide.
