Joe Klein writes in Time:

For all the palpable good that Wright has done his community, his parishioners have paid a subtle price, especially the younger, poorer, less educated ones. When he spreads canards like the one about the AIDS conspiracy, he is telling them that white power is so overwhelming that it's almost impossible to succeed. The success of Obama's candidacy sends the very opposite message, which may be why Wright is so threatened by it. If Obama wins the presidency—if we can break past the barrier of race—there won't be much of a market for oppression-thumping orators like Jeremiah Wright. (emphasis mine)

Is that what Obama's candidacy is about?

To prove that Black people are not oppressed in America?

That by electing the half white son of an African exchange student, raised by white people, who attended prep school and elite universities, we wiil have  proven that we have "broken past the barrier of race" and that African-Americans are no longer oppressed?

Is this some sort of a twenty first century, white liberal, version of Walt Disney's, "Song of the South"?

Sorry folks, but even Reverend Wright's AID's conspiracy theory is more serious a take on the condition of contemporary  African-Americans than that.

In fact, everything about Reverend Wright is more authentic than this "JFK meet Sydney Poitier" ordure floating around the halo of the junior senator from Illinois.

If electing Barack Obama means that from now on white America can tell any American black person that they "have nothing to complain about", than "President Obama" would be the worst news for African Americans since Reconstruction ended.
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I have been watching Jeremiah Wright's speech to the NAACP and he is wonderful speaker.

I showed it to my German wife and she said, "Why are people attacking him, everything he says is true?

I suggest people read the transcript of the speech, it is like Obama before the caffeine was removed.

I think that Reverend Wright is much more interesting than Barack Obama.

It seems to me that either you are with Reverend Wright or you're not, but what Wright says is true enough and important enough to stand up for, but if you put winning above that and if you could, ethically, then you distance yourself in time. As it is Obama stands as either a closet pink or a wimp.

"Barack Obama went to Rev. Wright’s church as a young man and was blessed with the Christian bona fides that would be absolutely essential for a high-profile political career." Bob Herbert - New York Times

Being "black" in the USA is a culture and Obama, culturally an outsider, but dressed by nature for the part, and wishing to join that culture, could hardly have found a more exciting and "authentic" Sherpa than Jeremiah Wright. I can easily understand that, as an Harvard man and Hawaiian preppy, wanting to be down, Obama must have felt that he had found the Rosetta Stone of African-Americanness, when first he set eyes and ears on the Reverend Wright.

Actually, I liked what I saw of Wright at the National Press Club and especially his speech to the NAACP.  I think he is a wonderful speaker and what he said made sense. However he speaks like someone of the left and America is a right wing country.

I fear that Obama's "chickens" are also coming home to roost.

I think Barack Obama could have had a hundred other pastors on the South Side of Chicago, that were not as clever or fast on their feet as Reverend Wright, but who were not as controversial either.

But Reverend Wright is not just another preacher, he is a man of great charisma and of enormous credibility in his community... with the political power that carries.

Wright's "Nihil Obstat" gave Barack Obama, a half white, Harvard man, with a distant African-African father, the community credentials that allowed him to build a credible political base in the African-American community of Illinois, from which to continue to play the role he was born to, that of  "JFK meets Sydney Poitier"

My question would be, When did Obama consider running for President? Because it should have been obvious to anyone, and certainly obvious to anyone with his enormous skills, that Wright would be poison to a lot of the people whose votes he would need to ever win the presidency, when the Roves of this world would be going over him with a microscope.

He should have begun years ago to, ever so gently, ever so diplomatically, distance" himself from Wright . Publicly comparing an advocate of "black liberation theology" to his white grandmother from Kansas was probably not the most propitious way of doing that.

Wright may be many things, but I don't think he is anyone to trifled with

When he "distanced" himself from Wright, didn't he know that Wright might be mortally offended and that his pastor was a man of formidable verbal skills and a mighty ego?

Like the Bittergate gaffe, there is something tone deaf and dumb about all of this and if there is any label that I would not have thought applicable to Barack Obama it is the label, "dumb".

Perhaps it is all about what I've been saying for months now, Obama has been brought along too fast. Impatience has spoiled a great talent... for the moment at least.

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