Obama Unmasked

Senator Barack Hussein Obama's meteoric rise is astonishing given his anemic record of achievement.  From an undistinguished two-year stint as junior Senator from Illinois, he stands poised to become the Democratic nominee for President and perhaps our nation's first black President.  But there are risks in such a candidacy for the Democrats in their anodyne endorsement of so unexamined a figure, for in the scrutiny of a Presidential run, damaging elements of a nominee's past may intrude unexpectedly.

Indeed, no one anticipated the Pastor Wright controversy for Obama presented himself as the precise opposite: he was the candidate of hope and change, a uniter and healer, the post racial candidate who, through his election, would bind the nation's racial wounds. 

Then we come to find that the angelic Senator from Illinois had sat in the pews of the Trinity United Church of Christ for the last twenty years, presided over by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a man whom Obama considers his mentor and spiritual guide.  And Wright is not post racial at all.  He, in fact, has trafficked heavily in the commerce of racial grievance and anti-Americanism.  From Wright have come the lustiest of tirades and denunciations of his country, leftist staples with a conspiracy laden and Afrocentric twist. 

He blames the US, for example, for engineering the AIDS virus to “commit genocide against people of color.”  He morally equated 9/11 with the bombing of Hiroshima.  He urged his black parishioners not to sing "God Bless America," but to "God Damn America.”  He has loaded his sermons with anti-Semitic cargo and has befriended known anti-Semite and black supremacist, Louis Farrakhan.  He is a segregationist and subscribes to black liberationist theology.  Suffice it to say, his message is not one of healing and unity but of hatred and strife, a black version of the KKK. 

And so why did the leading candidate for Democratic nominee for President attend the UCC, spending his Sundays listening to Reverend Wright's racist, anti-American chants, having his children baptized by the racist pastor, and naming his best selling autobiography, the Audacity of Hope, after one of his sermons?

Obama, the biracial unifier, the messianic candidate who would deliver us from our sins, has been exposed.  For his pastor of choice is not just divisive but destructive and dangerous.  And with this revelation, attempts to package Obama as a unifier appear unhinged, to say the least. 

What we find instead is a young, political aspirant establishing a base in Chicago from which to launch a political career.  He needed contacts and backing, and so he played the race game by joining Reverend Wright and the UCC.  But he didn't really believe all that racist/leftist drivel?  He, of course, denies it.  Yet, it does require a suspension of judgment to imagine that Obama could sit there all those years and not concur with some of the hate filled messages of his pastor.

In terms of policies, he is no uniter, reaching across the aisle and coming up with bipartisan solutions.  He is doctrinaire leftist.  He plans to raise taxes, increase spending, nationalize health care, restrict trade, and surrender in Iraq.  He regularly attacks the usual objects of leftist derision, corporations, the "rich," Wall Street, and the GOP and engages in class warfare and the politics of envy; he seeks, if anything, to convert everyone into "victims," white or black and to create ever-larger constituencies for the government.  While his rhetoric may sound transcendent, there is nothing "unifying" in Obama's specific policy proposals, just as there is nothing conciliatory in his past associations. 

Obama's candidacy, however, revolves not around policies (there is not a paper cut's difference between him and Hillary Clinton) but symbolism and allegory.  He served a vital role in the psyche and conscience of the country.  He gave whites a chance to feel good about themselves and to relieve their guilt by supporting an historic candidacy and electing to the highest office in the land a black, thereby metaphorically absolving the nation of its racist sins.  For blacks, he provided an opportunity to derive vicariously some sense of hope and meaning in their lives and to banish any lingering sense of inferiority.

But Obama, the Sainted Negro, is no longer the vehicle of redemption for his flawed nation, for the redeemer himself has been found wanting.  At the very least, he is dishonest - to either his pastor whom he pretended to agree with to build a power base or to his country, by pretending to be a uniter when in reality he endorsed (despite his denials) much of what his pastor taught.  What we have in Obama unmasked is a dissembler with little credibility whom the country should not trust to lead it.