Juan Williams dissects the problems and failings of Barack Obama in handling the Reverend Wright/Father Pfleger/Trinity United Church issue (i.e. his association with race-baiting, hate-spewing extremists). He argues, as many at CONTENTIONS have, that Obama has been dishonest and evasive in coming to terms with and explaining his relationship with those at such odds with his post-racial appeal. Williams counsels:
This time he has to admit to sins of using race for political expediency – by knowingly buying into divisive, mean messages being delivered from the pulpit. He has to say that, as a biracial young man with no community roots, attaching himself to Rev. Wright and the Trinity congregation was a shortcut to move up the ladder in the Chicago political scene. He has to call race-baiting what it is, whether it comes from a pulpit or calls itself progressive politics. And he has to challenge his supporters, especially his black base, to be honest about real problems at the heart of today’s racial divide – including out-of-wedlock births, crime, drugs and a culture that devalues education while glorifying the gangster life.
This would be lovely, but I suspect he won’t do it, not ever. First, it may not be true, as Stanley Kurtz contends. Obama’s attachment to these people may have been sincere, part of his identification and support for a far left agenda. But even if Kurtz is wrong, and this was all expediency by Obama, how could the Agent of Change, The New Politician ever admit as much? His entire campaign, indeed his life, would be revealed as a fraud.
Moreover, confessing his sins is just not his style. As I have argued repeatedly with regard to his efforts to bridge the divide with the Jewish community, he cannot succeed in overcoming concerns because he refuses to come to terms with the real reasons for the antipathy which many Jews feel toward him. Obama has not not leveled with or sought to explain his relationship with a preacher who railed against Israel, nor his association with Palestinians who villified Israel. He hasn’t addressed concerns about his choice of foreign policy advisors. (Nor does he confess the error of his ways in advocating for over a year that he meet directly and unconditionally with Ahmadinejad, the world’s most prominent Holocaust denier.) He would rather attribute the problems he is having to gossipy emails or his middle name.
It is ironic that Obama constantly castigates President Bush, and more recently John McCain, for not admitting errors. That is Obama’s great fault, and may yet be his undoing.
