The significant failure in Obama’s speech
In my look-see at Obama’s speech, I sort of backed my way into saying that Obama’s speech basically just gives credence to the black sense of victimhood. Thus, at the end, I noted that I could bored and tuned out because Obama started bloviating about the same old cycle of poverty and victimhood which, I pointed out, is a mantra that precisely coincides with the decline of the black middle class, which was just pulling itself out of the abyss into which centuries of slavery had plunged it. Trust Jonah Goldberg, who wrote his column when Barack Obama hadn’t even given his speech, to hone in precisely on the problem with the speech (emphasis mine):
Barack Obama will reportedly give a major speech this morning at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, addressing the controversy about his extremist pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
Obama needs to do two things. First, he needs to make it incandescently clear that Wright doesn’t speak for him in any meaningful way. If he won’t do that, his campaign is a fraud and he is not qualified to be president.
Second, he needs to explain to black America why Wright’s views are so poisonous.
[snip]
Obama righteously deplores “divisiveness.” And yet he literally worships at the altar of division. He wants to transcend race, but his black nationalist church and his liberation theology pastor consider race permanent and central issues.
Obama claims that he’s a different kind of politician, but his “repudiation” of Wright last week is traditional pol-speak and nothing more. To listen to Obama, you’d think he was the only person in Chicago not to know that his minister is a hatemonger. Either Obama is the worst judge of character in living memory or he’s not the man he’s been portraying himself as.
Or there’s a third option. Perhaps Obama didn’t hear Wright’s bilious rhetoric because it blended in with the chorus around him. This is the fact that Obama really needs to address if the “Obama movement” is about more than getting the junior senator from Illinois elected.
[snip]
A 2005 study by the Rand Corp. and the University of Oregon found that nearly half of African Americans say they believe that HIV is man-made. More than 25% think that it’s a government invention, and one in eight say it was created and spread by the CIA. Just over half believe that the government is purposely keeping a cure from reaching the poor.
And please, spare me the rationalization that blacks have reason to be conspiratorial. Doubtless there’s truth to that. But that doesn’t make the conspiracy theories any more true or any less destructive.
In the 2005 issue of Social Science Quarterly, Sharon Parsons and William Simmons tried to explain why conspiracy theories like these persist in the black community. Part of the answer, they concluded, is that black politicians have no interest in dispelling them. Paging Sen. Obama!
Obama preaches unity. Well, real unity requires real truth-telling and the ability to tell right from wrong, and Wright from right.
Yeah, what he said! Goldberg neatly anticipated precisely what I found wrong with Obama’s speech, which is that it criticizes Wright’s more hate-filled rhetoric, even while giving continued credence to the pathologies that underlie it.
