One of the better analysis of Obama and Wright today by Stanley Kurtz:
Remember when we were hearing about the need to purge Michael Moore and the MoveOn crowd from the Democratic Party? Obama is the polar opposite of all that–and in a devilishly clever way. Rather than move the Democrats away from the Michael Moores or Jeremiah Wrights, Obama buys absolution for them from the rest of the country. No, Obama does not fully agree with Jeremiah Wright, but the Democratic Party under Obama will be complacent about its Michael Moore wing. That’s why the MoveOn types are so excited about Obama. There will be plenty of the most left-leaning appointees staffing the federal bureaucracy and set into judgeships under Obama, and all of it will be smoothed over by speeches about national healing and understanding pain. Under Obama, the Michael Moore-MoveOn wing, far from being purged, will be in the catbird seat, and all because they’ve found the perfect spokesman.
Obama says he’s too close, and too personally indebted to Wright, to break with him. But how did he get close to Wright to begin with? Wright could not have taken up so huge a space in Obama’s life unless Obama had let Wright in. And Obama let Wright in because of Wright’s sermons, not in spite of them. Obama may not have agreed with Wright’s solutions, or even with his final judgements, but something about Wright’s anger had to have attracted Obama–had to have seemed tantalizingly “authentic.” From the beginning, Obama had to have been sufficiently attracted to Wright’s excesses to forgive them. Then he sought to draw closer. In this positive attraction to anti-American anger (even if that anger is not quite entirely shared) Obama embodies the sensibilities of the elite academic radicals that are his real heritage and milieu.
Far from pulling a Hubert Humphrey or a Tony Blair and casting the radical left out of the party, Obama seems to see his job as getting the rest of the country to adopt a stance of relative complacency toward the most egregious sorts of anti-Americanism–all under the guise of achieving national unity. The real precedent here is Jimmy Carter sitting next to Michael Moore at the Democratic National Convention. Does Carter endorse everything Michael Moore says? I doubt it. If pressed, would Carter in fact condemn some of what Moore has said? Most likely. But in the end, Carter stood with Moore and put an acceptable face on what should in fact be considered unacceptable. Of course, even that doesn’t begin to compare to Obama’s decades-long association with Wright, and his decision, for years, to place Wright at the core of his political identity.
MoveOn loves the speech, of course. It explains it all in their eyes because, well, there really was nothing to explain anyways. Black hate towards whites is justified and must be acknowledged you see…..
Those who loved themselves some Obama will love him now. Those who saw him as dangerous before will see him just as dangerous now.
But what of those who didn’t love him or hate him? Who were agnostic about the man….Will this Wright/Obama love affair move them away from Obama?
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