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.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Choose Your Pastor Well, Tibet Runs Rings Around or Out of China
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)