Getting to know Obama
..."Yep. Every week. 11 o'clock service." And he never heard Wrights hateful remarks? He never noticed that Ayers was an unrepentant terrorist? He has to be a person who pays little to know attention to those he claims to be closed to. How can someone drift through life in the company of radicals and loons and not notice? How can the media ignore the inconsistency of Obama's answers on these points. Clearly they don't care because they are not in fundamental disagreement with Wright and Ayers beyond the inconvenience and "distractions" they present to appealing to rational voters.
The country is in two unpopular wars -- amid the worst financial panic of the last 80 years. Not since prophet of change and newcomer Jimmy Carter ran against Gerald Ford (post Watergate and the lost Vietnam war) have voters been so eager for a shake-up.Why then is the charismatic Barack Obama not quite yet a shoo-in?
Easy. Voters apparently still don't know who Obama is, or what he wants to do -- and so are still not altogether sure that Obama is the proper antidote to George Bush. After more than a year of campaigning, he still remains an enigma.
Obama promised to be the post-racial candidate who would bring us together. But when asked in March 2004 whether he attended regularly Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama boasted, "Yep. Every week. 11 o'clock service."
The healer Obama further characterized the racist Wright as "certainly someone who I have an enormous amount of respect for." And Obama described the even more venomous father Michael Pfleger as "a dear friend, and somebody I interact with closely."
Obama can dismiss his past associations with Bill Ayers as perfunctory and now irrelevant. But why then did an Obama campaign spokesman say Obama hadn't e-mailed with or spoken by phone to Ayers since January 2005 , suggesting more than three years of communications -- in a post-9/11 climate -- after Ayers said publicly he had not done enough bombing?
Obama's campaign shrugged when legal doubts were raised about the sloppy voter registration practices of ACORN -- an organization that Obama himself has both helped and praised.
Yet Obama once was a stickler for proper voter documents. In 1996, he had all of his Democratic rivals removed from the ballot in an Illinois state primary election on the basis of sloppy voter petitions.
Many of Obama's surrogates, from congressional leaders like Rep. John Lewis to his running mate, Joe Biden, have suggested that the McCain and Palin candidacies have heightened racial tensions. Do such preemptory warnings mean that one cannot worry about Obama's 20-year relationship with Rev. Wright or long association with Father Pfleger?
It's also unclear exactly what Obama's message of "hope" and "change" means. The hope part turned a little weird when Obama, in prophetic fashion, proclaimed, "We are the ones we've been waiting for," and later put up Greek-temple backdrops for his speech at the Democratic convention.
If we didn't get that supernatural message, Obama also promised of his election that it would be the "moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."
And change? Obama himself has changed positions on FISA, NAFTA, campaign public financing, town-hall meetings with McCain, offshore drilling, nuclear and coal power, capital punishment and gun control, his characterization of Iran, the surge in Iraq, and the future of Jerusalem. So change from what to what?
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