A thoughtful post, but some counter points:

 "What I don't see is…how Obama…can compare whatever racist mumblings of his white grandmother to the prepared sermons of a preacher before his flock."

 The point here, as you can probably tell, is how these relationships parallel one another.  The stock counterpoint I've encountered most frequently has been "Obama can't choose his grandmother, but he can choose his pastor."  I suppose that's true to an extent, but it ignores what he was saying about personal nature of those connections by grilling him (rather obtusely, I’d say) on the literal bearing of these relationships.  I mean, yes, technically, he can "choose" another pastor.  But he can also "choose" to spurn his grandmother.  I've written before that my father, for all his wisdom in many areas, carries some unquestionably blue-collar baggage when it comes to homosexuals, hispanics, etc.  If that was all he was, or even what most of him was, just because begot me doesn't mean I'm contractually obliged to love and honor him.  God knows some people really hate their parents.  The point Obama was attempting to make, I thought, was that his relationship with Rev. Wright extends to a level far deeper and meaningful level than heated, three-minute youtube clip. He said as much.  Besides putting Rev. Wright's anger in a historical and cultural context, which he asks us to try and understand--not condone, but understand--he also asked us to cease our self-righteous chatter of gavels that in effect relegate a well-respected religious scholar and noted community activist to the cartoonish embodiment of "black hate."

Personally, I don’t see the difference between “racist mumblings” and “prepared sermons.”  Both are releasing pent up prejudices.  How is giving greater articulation to the same fundamental anger any worse or different?  It’s all catharsis for the same emotional undercurrent.  Does the fact "mumblings" could be better checked on second thought make the emotion less prevalent? How it’s expressed has less bearing than why it’s being expressed in the first place—at least in terms of this example.

 “He excuses Rev. Wright's anger because of when he grew up, but Wright was quite a bit younger than Martin Luther King, who had many more fights to wage against worse conditions, and who managed to keep his message of love and hope even while standing up to racism. Malcolm X split from the intolerance of his church and made his way into a more accepting if not humbled view of humanity.”

I think it’s pretty dense to suggest that just because Jeremiah Wright was younger than Martin Luther King, Jr., he has somehow been spared the worst parts of discrimination.  His age has absolutely no bearing on the nature, frustration, and pain of his experiences of being a black man living in America, and it’d be terribly thick to assume otherwise.  Furthermore, throwing up Martin Luther King, Jr. as an appropriate model for constructive protest holds Wright up to a very naïve standard of conduct.  How many Gandhis do you know, personally or historically?  Anger is a far more natural and inevitable human response than is becoming a historical paragon of peace.  I’m not saying it’s preferred, but I mean, let’s get real here.  To cynically dismiss Obama’s message as you have done on TPM numerous times, I’m guessing that your worldview is littered with half-empty glasses.  Expecting Wright to take some notional highroad shows a pretty credulous idealism, no? 

As for Malcolm X, he left the Nation of Islam not because of its anti-white rhetoric, but because he was spiritually repulsed by the adultery of its leader, Elijah Mohammad.  What’s more, the event that directly precipitated Malcolm’s departure had nothing to do with the NOI’s spiritual hypocrisy at all, but came when Mohammad silenced Malcolm for, interestingly enough, describing the assassination of JFK as “America’s chickens coming home to roost.”  Malcolm X did eventually recant his earlier anti-white rhetoric after leaving Elijah Mohammad, but it wasn’t a matter of him simply growing disgusted or shocked with the racist views of the Nation of Islam.  He had vocally espoused those ideas for over a decade, in terms far more racist and hostile than anything Jeremiah Wright has ever said.  He completely mocked MLK’s belief of nonviolent protest several times, which goes to show how not all angry black activists are endeared to non-threatening protest. But the point is, Malcolm’s spiritual reawakening came at the end of his Hajj—a profoundly meditative and soul-searching experience taken by a man who had lost an enormous portion of his spiritual identity—it was not a simple matter of splitting “from the intolerance of his church.”  To say the driving issue for him was being suddenly fed up with the racism he had believed in for over a decade blurs his motives for leaving and the nature of his religious meditation entirely.  What's more, you're using it to discount the reality and historical legitimacy of racially tinged black anger.  I do not agree with it, nor do I like it, but it's a visceral reaction to the perpetual treading on a collective sense of worth by a group who historically oppressed them with violence.  It is a different kind of anger than the hate of the KKK, emerging out of an wholly different collective experience and is, yes, therefore not stigmatized to the same levels that white society treats its own legacy of oppressive, exploitative race hate.  No, it's not okay, but saying 9/11 was the result of The Great White West's arrogant lording over ethnically colored nations is worlds away from African Americans genetically inferior, stupid, lazy, savage, criminally-inclined, n*ggers.  What sounds more hateful to you, and what sounds more generically angry?Yes, Malcolm X may have been an angry black man who eventually saw the folly in being angry, but it’s a far cry from even remotely paralleling the circumstances surrounding Jeremiah Wright.

Personally, regardless of Jeremiah Wright’s comments on Louis Farrakhan (he did not, by the way, ever say Farrakhan “epitomized greatness.”), Trinity Church is not the Nation of Islam.  Not only is Trinity’s father-denomination, The United Church of Christ, overwhelmingly white, but also the Trinity congregation is not exclusively black.  An op-ed in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune by a woman who attends Trinity (and who is, incidentally, married to a white man) admits that while some of the sermonizing might make some whites uncomfortable, there are always whites sitting in the pews at Trinity.   It is not a “hate whitey” church, wherein a dashiki-swathed Wright furiously expounds upon the evils of the white character while the enraptured throng echoes his sentiments with resounding Amens.  All of the controversial comments made by Reverend Wright I’ve heard just denounce white America, which, when you look two words down within the context of that statement, is rhetorically linked to the government (and who heads it up?  Why, the Grand Old White Party, of course!) Anti-American it might be, anti-white "hate speech" it most certainly is not.  And if it isn't anti-white, then how can it be called "hate speech"?  Hate speech, when I last checked, is defined essentially by race.  Wright has never called anyone a “white devil” in these speeches, nor has he ever demanded his “flock” eschew associations with whites or cooperation with white organizations.  Big deal, you might say.  It doesn't change the fact he said “white.”  Yeah, but he does not expound upon the perceived tyrannies or eternal flaws of white character.  He attacked the government, sometimes with honest points, sometimes with horribly looney ones, but the government--not the coveted Reagan Democrats, not the white people in attendance that day, not you, and not I.  The closest thing to a culturally racist remark was when he claimed Zionism had an element of “white racism” to it—a comment which, by the way, is regarded anti-Semitism-free by the Anti-Defamation League.  Trinity is not a racist church, despite its edgy sermons, as its members—black and white—have and will continue to attest.  Yet, to stubbornly persist with allegations of hate speech despite these accounts is truly bad, arrogant form.  In continuing to harp on the "hateful" content of these snippets with wholly undue self-assurance in your convictions, you are not only casting suspicions about the potentially “hateful” effects of Wright’s sermons on Obama, but you are also effectively extending the same baseless and ugly mistrust to the entire congregation of Trinity.

Someone said if we really want a constructive discussion and comparison between candidates, we should talk policy.  So, I'm going to ask an open question to Clinton and Obama supporters: who has the better healthcare plan and why?

Personally, I think incentives are better than a mandate, but I'll wait to see if people respond before I lay out my reasons.

See, I wish I could find more Clinton supporters like you.

I support Obama, but what you've said has some truth. I do agree that a lot of Obama supporters do make constant parallels to Hillary, and in recent months, it'd seem that as the Clinton campaign gets ballsier, the blogosphere is alight with a lot of outraged Obama supporters baying for blood.  This could be the majority of them, and even though I too have partaken in lampooning the Hildebeest (rather smugly, as you can tell), I wouldn't really consider myself to be part of the "non-Hillary" voting bloc.  See, I suppose one main area where we fundamentally disagree is, unlike you, I do want to see an inspirational leader in the White House.  I hardly think Obama is nothing but an award-winning smile--I believe he could get things done as well as Hillary can--but I treat his charisma and ability to galvanize so many people (particularly my youth group) as a definite asset.

Before Obama, excluding a very, very casual anti-war stance, I really didn’t have a noticeable interest in politics.  I can remember Bill Clinton telling America he did not have sexual relations with that woman, but I essentially came of age/ awareness during the Bush years.  The political understanding my mind begot over this period has been that there is absolutely no point in taking action for anything, ever, because ultimately the administration will turn an arrogant and defiant cheek.  Because of Bush's neo-imperialist aggression, the world seems to dislike us quite a bit at the moment, and I fear we now have far more genuine international threats than we did eight years ago.

So, you have to understand (and I hope you don't dismiss) the appeal a guy like Obama has for me.  Clearly, his message resonates beyond the youth, but it's probably not a stretch to say American youth have been most stirred by his words.  There are plenty of people in my twentysomething age bracket who find his message supremely bracing.  Many Obama naysayers pish-posh this appeal, and dismiss his supporters as cutely naïve, a noisy cafeteria of political Augustus Gloops stuffing Obama’s silver-tongue rhetoric into our mouths two hands at a time.  But I think this criticism falls resoundingly on its bum, because it wrongly assumes we're lapping up Obama’s words in the expectation that once he's in office, things will somehow, in some indescribable and unknowing way, get miraculously “better.”  It’s a big misconception, and all those pundits (yes, sadly, including Hillary) continue to cling presumptuously to this notion that we really are expecting “the skies to open up” and that “celestial choirs will start singing,” the moment Obama is sworn into office.  With it comes a procession of punditry that bandies around additional stereotypes—we’re all children and should be patronized as such, that an optimistic and inspirational political message automatically makes his policies void of content and meaning, that his perfervid throng of teenyboppers (that means you, union delegate teenyboppers) have canonized St. Barack and believe he can do no wrong. But all of it is such a painfully obtuse and tone-deaf understanding of Obama’s cultural appeal, essentially founded on belittling what they don’t understand.  The appeal of Obama isn't that he's someone who is going to make everything inexplicably better, some multi-racial rockstar/soothsayer, or Political Pied Piper vowing to single-handedly lead the rats out of Washington.  His appeal lies in the fact that he promises to let us have a voice again--a voice that has been so muted under Bush that many of my generation fail to see the point in even talking anymore.  Sure, this may not be particularly convincing to all of you. Those of you who have been around the block, I can only assume, have weathered enough political disappointment, lagging expectations, and broken promises to crack a bittersweet grin at the prospect of being charmed yet again.  Perhaps this message is not new to you, and so you won't buy into his ideological platform.  But all I can say is this: if I have confidence that our President will listen to us if we're loud enough, it's an enormous incentive to start getting involved in political and social action.  Change, Obama has continually maintained, is only possible when the people start working for it, and in order for the people to start working for it, we need an ideological match lit under our bottoms.  Scoffing Obama for being “just words,” misses the entire point.  Firstly, because he isn’t “just words,” and secondly, “just words” mobilize entire legions of young people to go out and believe they can make a difference.  Don’t underestimate that.  A person’s cynicism may be grounded in unfortunate experience and may well be justified, but on principle, cynicism does not equate sageliness.  Cynicism, in general, tends to be little more than an embittered condescension.  That's why I think inspiration is a lot more important than cynics and naysayers assume it to be.  If we're active, we have the chance to be formidable.  If we're apathetic, little will get done, regardless of who is sitting in Capitol Hill.

But look, I get that some people shrug or shake their heads at Obama’s alleged gospel of starry-eyed hope evangelism.  It's understandable.  I can even get the confusion over why so many people are taking a gamble on young senator Obama over Clinton's soi-distant "experience" when they ultimately agree on so many critical issues.  Frankly, angry as I have been at Hillary these past few weeks, chances are I'll still vote for her.  But where they differ has substantial bearing for me.  I'd like to point out that comparing candidates on their stances is essentially the way I choose my vote.

Hillary is a little too hawkish for my tastes.  She promises to withdraw our forces from Iraq, but the fact that she's stumped on slogans like "you need a leader who can bring both the arrows and the olive branch!" is disquieting.  I don't want her to start rattling a saber at Russia or even Iran over diplomatic stalemates, and I worry that her foreign policy ideology, while obviously not blunderingly Bushian, is still essentially confrontational and combative.  I don't like that she stumps on keeping America’s sleeping children “safe,” because keeping America “safe” seems to entail an overeager trigger finger.  McCain is stumping on keeping America “safe.”  Obama is also for bolstering national security, but his approach to foreign policy doesn’t suggest the same antagonism as Hillary’s.  I'd like to point out that during their Ohio debate, Hillary mentioned several times Serbia and Russia in vaguely threatening terms--as if these countries needed to be 'watched' or ‘dealt with’ rather than approached.  I dislike that stance.  We’re living in an age where there is no wisdom in going nuclear, and I don’t want someone whose foreign policy approach lingers remotely peripherally around such a hyperbolic outcome.

In contrast to Senator Arrows and Olive Branch, Obama has repeatedly stumped on meeting hostile leaders without preconditions--a policy that, tellingly, Hillary has attacked him frequently on.  Personally, I think it’s a very sound one.  Diplomacy can lead to stalemates, but rarely megaton destruction.  In a world where there is so much acute animosity towards us, I'd rather we have a leader eager to diffuse this animosity by way of reconciliation and negotiation, not needlessly, and perhaps defiantly, stirring the pot.  I don't think we need to engage in macho posturing with Putin, or treat Cuba with the throwback ideological hostility and apprehension we had back when the Cold War was relevant.  Hillary stumps an awful lot on her foreign policy credentials, but when she isn't touting her resume, she does tend to talk in terms that aren't particularly diplomatic--or if they are, represent a sort of hardline diplomacy that rarely, if ever, gets things done.  I want a negotiator and a conciliator in my leader, a person who will steer the country courageously in its darkest hours, but who will use military action as a last, defensive (and not preemptive) resort, rather than treating it like a holstered pistol, or a diplomatic fallback.

Another issue is healthcare.  Both Hillary and Obama want better coverage, but frankly, even though Hillary's plan is coated in a pleasant little socialist gloss, I think Obama's is much sounder.  Hillary says she wants to "provide" Americans with universal healthcare, but that's rather deceptive.  In reality, she wants to make every American to buy healthcare, enforcing the policy either by taking it out of our paychecks or penalizing us if we refuse to buy it.  There is an insurmountable chasm difference between state-sponsored healthcare and state-mandated healthcare.  I mean, it’s not the state sponsoring healthcare here, it is still the insurance companies. She hasn't disclosed how she's going to do this, and while she has hinted at ways of making it affordable through tax breaks and so on, ultimately, she remains very vague.  Sure, I suppose Obama's course of action is also hounded with hypotheticals and notional outcomes, and Hillary has roundly lampooned him for evidently being naïve enough to think all he needs to do is "ask" the industry to lower its rates.  Frankly, I don't think Obama intends to simply ask "please" and expect the industry to capitulate.  I do think he intends to get legislative of their ass.  I think regulating healthcare to provide more affordable rates for all Americans is a far more achievable and desirable plan than making everyone simply buy it at an undisclosed cost and for questionable coverage.  I already have to buy car insurance in New York; I don't need to be saddled with another steep, mandatory insurance bill for something that doesn’t guarantee to be that good.

Big deal, you might say.  Socialist countries tax heavily, so what's the difference in having the government simply take our healthcare payments out of our paychecks?  True, true.  But herein lies another reason why I've been lukewarm about Hillary: her bosom relationship with the healthcare industry.  The truth is, while Hillary's plan *may* benefit Americans, it will be an undeniably boon to the healthcare industry.  The government isn't regulating healthcare in this scenario, the insurance companies are, and Hillary is enabling them to reap a heinous superabundance of profit.  It's a veritable bonanza.  This won't be a problem if the coverage is acceptable to Americans, but I have to ask: if Hillary enjoys thoroughly chummy relations with the health insurance companies, and they're bound to reap profits regardless of the fate of the American people, what's to ensure that Hillary will work to give us the best deal possible?  For everyone who claims Obama can’t bring it about because he lacks the savvy of a season legislative vet, how can we be sure Hillary will even work for us?  If she's trying to reconcile the interests of both the insurance companies and the public, does this not open up the possibility a lacking compromise? Obama stumps on taking the healthcare industry down to size to have it serve the people.  Hillary seems to be trying to conflate big moneyed and public interests into one mutually beneficial agreement.  I'm not saying it won't work, but I will say I'm pretty dubious.  Given that Hillary obviously has some questionable donors in her tax returns and suspect earmarks projects, it causes me to take pause and ask just how many corporate interests is she obliged to before she owes us anything?  Yes, I know Obama has also taken corporate money.  It is just the way of Washington, and I'm sure it will hinder him in accomplishing certain things.  Again: I have not apotheosized the man; I do not expect him to be perfect.  The diminishing of his MSM-anointed super-morality with Rezko/Wright-related histrionics doesn’t cause my faith to curdle.  But for me, lobbied money is incriminating because of quantity and specifics of the sum more so than it being totally a matter of principle.  It's important to know where the money is coming from, how long it has been coming from where it has, and the implications of the sum. If Hillary is taking large funds from the healthcare industry, how can we really expect her to cut a fair deal for the American public?

Also: the judgment thing.  Hillary hasn't convinced me she'd be a good leader.  She is a little expedient, and while I suppose every senator does his or her share of political posturing, I thought it was bad form to jostle for electability on an issue as crucial as the war in Iraq.  Any decision that involves the mass mobilization of lives and resources should not ultimately boil down to how it benefits you in the long run.  I'm sorry, but that is poor character, and I want our Commander-in-Chief to be strong and conscientious, not conniving.  Bush and Cheney went into Iraq for selfish interests, and Hillary Clinton enabled them out of personal gain.  Hell, she can’t even admit she was wrong.  I don't want a president whose conscience plays second fiddle to her personal ambitions.  It is, among slimier things, an underwhelming starting point for making levelheaded decisions and trustworthy judgment.  Furthermore, Hillary's judgment over healthcare in the 1990s was a legislative cataclysm, and many of the missteps that enabled its implosion are still being exhibited by Hillary now: the moneyed interests, the egregious secrecy, exclusiveness to the point of alienating her fellow democrats, the overall inability to handle the pressure...if she's still essentially the same, how can I trust her to go about leading the country in any other way from what she's already shown me she's capable (or incapable) of?  Hillary had a hard time managing responsibility of one large executive project, and she seems to have an equally hard time in managing her current campaign, which is shaping up to be an operatic portrayal punctured hubris paired with a descent into madness that would belittle Lady Macbeth.  Obama has gone from 3am, to NAFTAgate, to several vettings on Rezko, to Muslim allegations, to Rev. Wright, and never once has he lost his composure, dignity, or grace.  Hillary, alternatively, is teetering to an emotional Chernobyl.  I’m having a hard time coming to terms with “Shame on you, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!” being howled on the floors of the U.N.

Finally, I'm unsold on Hillary's claim to "get things done."  Granted, Obama, although he does paint himself as post-partisan politician with both hands perpetually reaching across the aisle, he has an undeniably progressive senate record.  Yet, independents and old Rockefellar Republicans (you know, the legitimate, non-morally hypocritical Republicans) still support him.  I think he has the potential to make Washington less-partisan and will be more likely to conciliate opposing forces to bring about real policy.  However, Hillary, as exemplified in her "I'm a fighter" line, is not the kind of person to try and work towards group consensus on major issues.  Hillary is partisan and an inarguably polarizing figure, and while she may fight for and accomplish change in the short run, there's no telling how long it would last should Washington stay divided along the same partisan lines as it has. I honestly don't want a fighter.  I want a listener.  I don’t want the feminine candidate; I want the candidate touting the feminine approach.  Balls to the chromosomal makeup, I’m seeking a candidate who bests represents those chromosomes in their policies, not in their pantsuits.  I want a president who seeks to talk with, relate to, and reconcile people, a president who gets all parties to agree on a positive healthcare plan or economic policy to forge general consensus agreeable enough that the next majority/administration won’t work ceaselessly to bring down (as did the GOP post-Bill).  Policies don't need to simply shift, the whole political mindset needs to change.  With Obama, while I'm not sure he can deliver on everything he says, there is a progressivism that vows to work towards alerting fundamental perspectives on how to reach across the aisle and get things done.  The man has a vision, and vision, even if it is not entirely achieved, is what I feel this country needs.  I feel like taking a gamble on someone who has the potential to be progressive rather than the candidate who will merely herald the return to the administration of blue-dresses, blowjobs, rampant privatization, and a vicious assault on the welfare system.

That’s why I support Obama.  Now, why do you support Hillary?