North Star Writers Group - Syndicated Commentary: Opinion, Humor and Features

October 27, 2008

It’s All Wright: Obama’s Wrong-Headed Rev is McCain’s Last Best Hope

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me repeatedly and across the board, and I am a fool . . . who deserves whatever happens to me.

Abetted by a flat-footed opponent and a compliant media, Barack Obama has pulled off the most incredible image transformation since Dorian Gray. He’s morphed from unrepentant left-of-Hillary Clinton liberal to cool, soothing, tax-cutting moderate and budget hawk. He’s been transfigured from celebrity ingénue to calm, presidential-looking-and-sounding statesman. And he’s regenerated himself from scary consorter with radicals and race-baiters to favorite of heavy-hitting, former Republican secretaries of State.

Try as he might – and hobbled by a four-to-one spending disadvantage – John McCain can’t seem to penetrate the impervious media and popular cocoon around his opponent.

Forget Teflon. Obama’s the Kevlar Candidate.

All this foolery is especially frustrating given the prospect that Obama’s selection by a wool-pulled-over-the-eyes electorate – combined with Dem dominance of the legislative branch – could unleash an orgy of spending, taxation, cultural warfare and global defeatism that would make Jimmy Carter look like Attila the Hun.

Yet even at this late date, one powerful and compelling weapon could revive the rapidly dwindling doubts about the exceedingly junior senator from the Land of Lincoln.

Anyone remember Reverend Jeremiah Wright?

A final week featuring wall-to-wall video of the greatest hits of America’s un-pastor would be a vivid reminder of everything that used to concern the citizenry about Barack Obama. But just as McCain has allowed himself to be fitted with cement overshoes on campaign funding, he has been unilaterally disarmed by refusing to touch the not-so-good reverend with the proverbial 10-foot pole.

Why the reticence to rejoin Obama and his erstwhile spiritual advisor at the hip?

Partly because McCain painted himself into a box by fuming that a North Carolina Republican ad last April featuring the Right Reverend’s infamous “G*d d**n America” rant was, "not the message of the Republican Party."

Partly, I believe, because McCain is spooked by the spectre of Willie Horton and the withering racial criticism Bush 41 came under for making a matinee idol of the African-American murderer, who – taking advantage of a weekend furlough granted under Michael Dukakis – twice raped a Maryland woman after merely pistol-whipping, stabbing, tying up and gagging her fiancé.

But mostly because the commander is an upstanding, decent and honorable guy who does believe politics should be played under a code – and that a Wright slight would cross the line.

I have no such compunction. And since Sen. McCain won’t remind you of Wright’s wrongs and raves, I will.

Of his declaration that with 9-11, “America's chickens are coming home to roost."

Of his implication that the United States is a terrorist nation.

Of his slur of our country as “the United States of KKK-A.”

And most disturbing of all, of his fantasy that the government “lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.”

Why, you may ask, is any of this relevant?

Because Obama’s decision five months ago to part with Wright – as part of his extreme political makeover – can’t undo the fact of his nearly two-decade relationship with a church and a pastor whose outrageous statements were most assuredly not taken out of context, as both men claimed, but part of a steady weekly diet of poison.

The Horton ads underscored the seriously ugly real-world consequences of the eerily cerebral and aloof Dukakis’s ivory-tower theories.

And Obama’s coziness with Wright, Bill Ayers and the ACORN crowd exemplify his comfort with, and even inspiration by, actors far out of the mainstream – informing a liberal, even radical politics that, no matter how candy-coated, is already heightening class warfare and threatening our economic system and cultural unity.

If O can choose a pastor who called our nation’s highest judicial institution a “closet Klan court,” whom will he choose for his own judicial nominees? If he can follow a guru who peddles dangerous conspiracy theories as gospel truth – literally – what wild departures from reality might his various cabinet and commission appointees foist upon America?

Worst of all, Obama’s surprisingly successful efforts to slip his onetime mentor highlight his quick-change artistry and too-clever-by-half willingness to say anything that will get him elected.

After all, Barry O first claimed to be unaware of Wright’s outrages, then admitted, “Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes." (Like we all hadn’t figured that out already.) He insisted nevertheless that he could “no more disown (Wright) than I can my white grandmother” – whom he proceeded to accuse of being a closet bigot. Then he finally threw the pastor under the bus when Wright finally went too far even for his tolerant protégé in a speech before the National Press Club.

In other words, after Obama tried in vain to fool America regarding his relational and philosophical kinship with his racist, radical pastor, Wright made him the fool – something an American electorate with a surprisingly short collective memory should not allow Obama to do to them on November 4 and thereafter.

Let’s go to the videotape.

Click here to talk to our writers and editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.

To e-mail feedback about this column, click here. If you enjoy this writer's work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry it.

This is Column # RM010. Request permission to publish here.