Obama's Race Speech Fails

Having seen the speech and heard a day's worth of commentary on Obama's attempt to quell the mounting furor over his minister and spiritual adviser's well-publicized and documented racist and anti-American speech, I must conclude that he failed.

Sure, as I told the liberal son of a friend last night, Obama convinced his own party's left wing, and probably the slightly-left-of-center members, as well.

But, despite naming the fear, in hopes of conquering it, he almost certainly has lost the 'Reagan Democrats' of mid-America. They are the middle-class, sometimes blue-collar, often male voters who swing about the center of the American political spectrum.

Listening to the more balanced black commentators yesterday, including Fox News/NPR's Juan Williams, it was obvious that even they felt Obama erred grievously by failing to have left his church and minister years ago, upon hearing the latter's anti-white and anti-American statements.

A liberal friend of mine agreed with me that Obama has now lost the election by failing to explicitly and totally sever himself from the repugnant minister. But, in reality, she said, he lost when he continued to sit in the church's pews and silently accommodate and tolerate such speech. Interestingly, she asked,

'How, as a partly-white American, could he sit there in silence and have half of himself damned by this minister?'

As I recollected to my friend's son last night, Michael Dukakis' turning point came in a debate, when he failed to say he'd want the death penalty for the hypothetical rapist of his wife, should such a person be caught. Americans found his carefully-couched, legalistic reply to be unnatural and suspect.

In this campaign, I believe we are witnessing a similar moment for Obama. This is his Waterloo.

For what it's worth, his speech reflected the perspective of someone with whom, frankly, I seem to share very little in the way of views of our country.

Again, speaking with my friend's liberal son, I opined that while Obama is contending that race is a paramount issue in today's America, I simply don't agree. It's nowhere on a list of my top five or seven issues most in need of address in America today.

In fact, this young man with whom I spoke is, himself, the son of a multi-cultural couple, and speaks his mother's non-English language fluently. He attended a first-rate private high school, and one of the best Ivy universities. He surely is not the victim of racism in today's America.

What Obama construes as racism is, I believe, more a function of poverty stemming from America's uneven, locally-funded and controlled educational system. Confusing the two is a horrendous mistake.

By, among other things:

-comparing his minister to 'everyone else's' minister, rabbi, or priest in making statements with which he disagreed,
-using his own grandmother as a source of racial slurs,
-claiming that the race issue will be used by conservatives as they have used 'fear' tactics in other campaigns,
-claiming that the race issue leads to legitimate, wider debate of Obama's other favorite campaign topics,

I think Obama pointlessly and ineffectively made his speech a grab-bag of topics which both elevated the minister, rather than disowned him, and blurred the focus of his statements.

In the end, his explicit refusal to repudiate his relationship with the racist minister will assure that this issue has a life as long as Obama's candidacy.