Obama and "Friends".

I read that a Republican PAC group is planning on recirculating the most incendiary quotes from some Jeremiah Wright Sermons. I therefore decided to post some of my earlier reactions to the Wright/Obama connection, updated to include some of what’s happened since.

After the first hoopla about Wright, a University in Chicago retracted an offer of an honorary degree to him. This should make us think, but not the way people have been thinking. Why is it that a University in Wright’s hometown was so eager to honor him in the first place? Surely they were aware of at least some of his many failings. The answer seems to be that they honored him not for what he said, but what he did—the soup kitchens, day care, drug and legal counseling, senior citizen home, and mentoring for young people. For more details on these many accomplishments, see the entire interview with Bill Moyers.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04252008/watch.html


Although I certainly disagreed with many things Wright said in that inteview, I would never refuse to vote for somebody because they once admired this man. Among the many quotes from this interview that you won’t see on Fox, or even in the New York Times, is Wright’s description of the ideas behind his mentoring program.

You can't be what you ain't seen. And so many of our young boys haven't seen nothing but the gangs and the pimps and the brothers on the corner. They've never sat and talked to lawyers, they've never sat and talked to a man, a black man, with 2, 3 degrees! They've never had a chance, they've never had an option in terms of thinking I could do this? I can be this? They see a doctor when they're sick. They don't get to sit and talk about med school. They don't talk to somebody who writes programs and analyzes systems and computers. A black guy? I can do this? They’ve never had their horizons lifted.

Obama could see that even though Wright regularly said a lot of stupid and hateful things, he regularly did a lot of heroic and kind things. This was among the answers that Obama gave in his first superb speech on this subject, and this is why my support for Obama is stronger than ever. Surely this is far preferable than our current executive branch, where people say heroic and kind things, and do stupid and hateful things. What we need desperately now is a president who is capable of communicating with, and even respecting, people he strongly disagrees with. As a young man, Obama could see through Wright’s weaknesses and still learn from his strengths. This ability is an essential part of being a skillful negotiator and a good leader, and will be a welcome change from the “Either you’re with us or against us” mentality which has made us so many enemies over the last eight years.

Everybody needs a list that begins “I would never associate with anyone who did the following”. My list includes things like murder, theft, eating babies, and thousands of other reprehensible behaviors. However, too many people on both sides of the political spectrum put people on that list who should be on the “People I would never include in my Presidential Cabinet” list and “People I think are seriously mistaken about a lot of important things” list. This means that negotiating has almost disappeared from the political and diplomatic scene. The assumption is that anybody who disagrees with you is a bad guy, and anybody who talks or listens to the bad guys is either a dupe or another bad guy. Consequently, problems that should be solved by negotiations end up being “solved” by military force. Obama’s natural instinct is to look for people he respects, whether he agrees with them or not, and try to understand their point of view. This ability enabled him to have a long and close apprenticeship with Reverend Wright, and this was time well spent. That apprenticeship is now over, which is why the time has come for Obama to break with Wright. What this country needs right now is someone with Wright’s compassion, energy, and organizational skills, but who doesn’t have his angry mouth. I think there’s a pretty good chance that Obama is that person.

That does not mean I would be comfortable with Wright being Obama’s advisor in the White House. But does anything seriously believe that President Obama would even so much as take a phone call from Wright at this point? Compare this to McCain’s relationship with a variety of characters on the extreme right. Which would you prefer—a president who used to be close friends with Wright, or a president who owes votes to a minister who calls the Catholic Church “The Whore of Bablyon”?

The Ayers situation is a bit different, because Ayers clearly did some bad things as well as said some bad things. But the Ayers connection with Obama was not a mentorship, or even a friendship. It was a temporary alliance with an organization that included one person who did some very bad things when Obama was eight years old, and later cleaned up his act and did some good things. To my knowledge, no one has ever criticized the projects on which Ayers and Obama worked together. The assumption seems to be that because Ayers did some bad things several years earlier, Obama should refuse to even sit in the same room with him. I don’t know what project Ayers and Obama worked on, but let’s assume it was something like building new libraries. Why should anyone say “I’m willing to sacrifice those libraries so that I don’t have to sit on the same committee with Ayers.” What exactly would that accomplish? As long as the project that Obama was involved with was doing good things, what does it matter that Ayers did some bad things years ago?

Part of political reality is that sometimes you have to work with people whose values are very different from yours. When McCain does this, he calls it reaching across the aisle. But when Obama reaches out to people with different values from his own, McCain claims that you can only measure a person’s worth by who he isn’t willing to work with. That doesn’t seem to me to be a very presidential attitude. I think that it’s very important to have high standards about what you’re willing to do. But if someone with a checkered past decides to do something good for a change, it seems to me that the sensible thing is to form an alliance with them, and get some good things done.

If anyone does find any corruption or other nefarious activity actually performed by any Obama/Ayers et. al. committee, Obama should be blamed in proportion to how much he knew about those activities. Compare the Obama/Ayers “relationship” to McCain’s close connection with the Keating Savings and Loan Scandal. McCain not only had a long personal relationship with a man who was eventually jailed for robbing thousands of people of their life savings. McCain played an active part in those activities that got Keating jailed. He was not founded legally culpable for what he did, but the connection was certainly closer than the connection between Ayers and the eight-year-old Obama.

Teed Rockwell