Posted by
ClearCommentary.com on Tuesday, April 29, 2008 2:40:49 PM
Political gifts are rare, and when they appear on the horizon, one always cynically thinks of the Trojan Horse scenario. But when Reverend Wright began to strut and fret his hour upon the stage, it became clear that this was a gift of lasting value. The reverend's stellar performance at the National Press Club in Washington yesterday, which confirmed that pastors aren't immune from the base allure of narcissism, reasserted, for the few who might have missed his prior performances, that America is racist, and it effectively invited 9/11.
He also posited the noxious notion that blacks have "different" learning styles than others, that their brains are wired differently, which conjures the arch racism of the late 19th century. If you saw any of his speech you might have wondered how Senator Obama, his wife, and two young daughters, could have sat through his sermons Sunday after Sunday.
That, of course, is the crux of this bizarre development. Most of us attend Sunday Mass or church services to deepen our faith, to better understand our obligations to God, and to better serve Him and our fellow man. We can't help but ask how Obama felt his faith was deepened by these kind of rantings, even if they only happened infrequently. Indeed, what kind of world view, what brand of morality, would comfortably mesh with Wright's caustic, distorted rantings?
A picture of Obama is emerging, but it's not the one he has so carefully crafted. On Sunday's Meet the Press, Richard Wolffe of Newsweek, blithely asserted that Mr. Obama can't be an elitist because he was the product of a single parent household, was raised in a foreign country, and just finished paying off his school loans. The entire panel, including the redoubtable Russert, let that pass without so much as a shrug.
It's stunning that they don't know that the kind of smug elitism that Obama is charged with has nothing to do with such superficialities, but everything to do with values, which is the prism through which we judge others. For Obama, the small town white man is an intellectually and culturally insular individual, with numbingly parochial concerns and aspirations. That universe, for the sophisticated urban elite, the black tie chattering classes, is so utterly remote as to be dismissed a priori.
As evidence, we need only consider the life of William F. Buckley. With his blue-blood background and intellectual rigor, he had all the trappings of an intellectual smug, yet he was the exact opposite. Obama seems to have succumbed to the trappings of the elite, perhaps because he's a cultural parvenu, while wanting to reserve the first right of denial, which is arguably the worst of both worlds.
With the slow drip of revelations that's transpiring, the contours of Obama's personality, his values, and principles, is emerging. Voters, even those in the throes of his charm, might start asking themselves whether this is the man we want in the White House for the next four years?