The Wright stuff: Obama's pastor and the Ricketts smear
Republicans are rightly shamed by a Super Pac ad plan to tag Obama as a black radical. The irony is his very lack of radicalism
Nebraska has already supplied the right with a billionaire boogeyman: Warren Buffet, hero of the secretarial pool and worldly philanthropist.
Now, the left has a Husker to hate: Joe Ricketts, the man for whom a group of Republican troublemakers dreamed up the perhaps-intentionally hilarious, to-be-sure-intentionally shocking "Plan to Defeat Barack Hussein Obama". The document's deadpan staccato phrasing has the punctuation-agnostic urgency and livid prose of a "Mission: Impossible" assignment memo (or an Austin Powers trailer). "The Plan. An Overview," reads the titular section:
"A five-minute unusually unique" – sic! – "film bringing his tutorship beneath Reverend Wright and others to the forefront of popular discourse … We start by raising an eyebrow. Teasers, hints of dark clouds to come. Buying print space, newspaper ads, kiosks at the airport, around the convention and skies overhead … A shocking message, the perfect radical messenger to attract attention, heavy press, two solid weeks of national television, heavy social media and a long-lasting web presence to run through the election."
I don't know why they would consider wasting all that time and money on ad buys when the message is so shocking it doesn't even always need verbs. Then again, the whole document is really a smoke-screen for an attack that is really only one word long. I'll give you a hint. The creators of the plan describe Obama as the "metrosexual black Abe Lincoln": which one of those terms, historically, is seen as a negative?
The Ricketts document wraps its attempts to undermine Obama in questions about "character", but Obama's connection to Jeremiah Wright doesn't unnerve conservatives because Wright has been inflammatorily critical of US policy. Obama's neighbor Bill Ayers was more literally up in arms about US policy; and while he's a touchstone of talk radio, no one is designing a game-changing campaign around him.
No, Wright is especially troubling because he has preached that black Americans are owed due to US policy, and that they should agitate until that debt is settled. And, in their hearts, I think most Americans (white and black) know that the debt exists – and that only black Americans will get to decide how and what its settlement means. There is no fear without basis in fact, and conservative chatter about Wright plays on the same anxieties that Wright himself stoked. White Americans will someday have to pay for the injustices that girded the early history of our country; we have an inheritance of guilt that cannot be assuaged by contemporary feints at fairness.
Republicans who recoil from engaging in the racial politics of the Wright connection aren't, after all, rejecting the premise. If anything, Romney's awkward repudiation (typically weird of him, by the way, to double-down on "repudiate" as his response to the ad; somehow overly formal and mildly grossed out by the idea of emotional engagement) to the Rickett material only underscores the message's volatility: it is political napalm, a poor weapon not because it is ineffective but because it burns everything it touches.
In other words, the problem with the Wright campaign as envisioned by Rickett's people isn't that it wouldn't work, it's that it would … and once you make your Rev Wright bed, people wearing white sheets are gonna want to lie in it, too.
Ironically, there is a more subtle criticism of Obama to glean from his attendance at Wright's church, one that's impossible to pin on the president as long as the attacks hinge on tying him more closely to Rev Wright than he has been already. Obama knew Wright for 20 years, but the most lasting impression Wright seems to have had on Obama's thinking is contained in a single turn of phrase: "The Audacity of Hope", a Wrightism significantly less divisive as any of the other quotes he's become known for.
Obama has said he wasn't even in the church to hear those. Taking Obama at his word, what we have is a guy who joined a church because he needed to join a church – to paraphrase Romney, he can't not have a church, he was "running for office, for Pete's sake". (Though now that he's been elected, he's free to sleep in on Sundays.) We have a guy who doesn't listen that closely to what his pastor has to say. In this understanding, Obama is less of a bombthrower than a gradualist in radical drag. He is craven and driven by political expediency – traits that are more typical of all politicians, black or white, and more insidious than the kind of racial bluster that no one above a congressman can get away with.
Obama's greatest fault isn't that he's different than all the other presidents who have come before him, it's that he's just like them. The really dangerous criticism buried in the Wright connection isn't that Obama believed all the things said in his church; it's that he didn't.
The worst thing you can say about Obama, really, is that he'll do almost anything to get elected. The same is true for Romney; he just has to have other people do it for him.
SOURCE: CLICK HERE to read more
Leave a comment and / or appreciate the article!
CLICK HERE to read more:» http://www.radio-elshaday.de/
CLICK HERE to read more:» http://www.radio-megapower.de/
CLICK HERE to read more:» http://christliche-radiosender.blogspot.com/
CLICK HERE to read more:» http://radiomegapower-nonstop.blogspot.de/
Posted by: Daniel Ioan Notar *DJ_DANY*
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen