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Archive for January 17th, 2008
Obama’s spiritual mentorPowerhouse Chicago preacher draws controversyCHICAGO - The packed house at Trinity United - some 3,000 in all - had been in the pews for almost two hours, energized by a 200-voice choir and a rousing dance performance Sunday, when the Rev. Jeremiah Wright stepped up to speak. The connection has thrown a spotlight on some of Wright’s more controversial remarks in a church that advertises itself as “unashamedly Black and unapologetically Christian” - at times espousing a black liberation theology that can sound as exclusionary as Obama’s message is inclusionary. He has also equated Zionism with racism. On Sunday morning - amid intensified crossfire between Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Obama over the use of race in the Democratic presidential campaign - Wright was preaching from the Gospel of John, using his powerful style to link the story of the loaves and fishes to a contemporary political message. Man should not put limits on what God can do, but that’s what people always do, he told the crowd. Just as God made five loaves and two fishes feed thousands, God has provided liberators for blacks in the past - from Nat Turner to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and now Barack Obama. But, Wright said, there were always reasons not to follow them. Some argue that blacks should vote for Clinton “because her husband was good to us,” he continued. “That’s not true,” he thundered. “He did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky.” Many in the crowd were on their feet, applauding - amazed, amused and moved by the fiery rhetoric of their preacher, who is about to retire. It is just such rhetoric that has made Wright’s remarks an occasional staple on conservative talk shows. They often make the rounds in anti-Obama e-mail. On occasion, the Illinois senator has distanced himself from Wright. In the past, the campaign has issued statements saying that Obama does not agree with all of Wright’s comments. An invitation to Wright to give the invocation at Obama’s announcement of his presidential candidacy last year was rescinded at the last moment, reportedly to keep the spotlight on Obama and not on Wright. Just yesterday, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen noted that a magazine associated with Trinity United once named Louis Farrakhan as its person of the year, praising the Nation of Islam leader. Cohen called on Obama to denounce such praise of Farrakhan, known for statements deemed anti-Semitic. In a statement released by his campaign last night, Obama responded to questions about Wright’s comments on Sunday. “As I’ve told Reverend Wright, personal attacks such as this have no place in this campaign or our politics, whether they’re offered from a platform at a rally or the pulpit of a church,” he said. “I don’t think of the pastor of my church in political terms. “Like a member of my own family, there are things he says at times with which I deeply disagree,” he said. “But as he prepares to retire, that doesn’t detract from my affection for Reverend Wright or appreciation for the good works he has done.” As in the past, Obama did not completely denounce Wright. The candidate’s 1995 book Dreams From My Father depicts Obama’s decision to join Trinity United as a fundamental step in affirming his identity as an African-American. Obama’s mother was white, he was raised in large part by her parents and he spent much of his youth in Indonesia with his mother’s second husband. He only met his father, a Kenyan, once. Obama took the title of his more recent book, The Audacity of Hope, from the first sermon he heard preached by Wright, whom Obama met while working in Chicago as a community organizer. In Dreams from My Father, Obama wrote of his reaction on hearing that sermon in 1988: “In that single note - hope! - I heard something else: At the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and the Pharaoh, the Christians in the Lion’s Den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church on this bright day seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world.” Dwight Hopkins, a professor in the divinity school at the University of Chicago who is a member of Trinity United, was not surprised by Wright’s comments about the Clinton administration on Sunday. Bill Clinton, he said, may have been from the South and appointed blacks to his Cabinet and opened an office later in Harlem, “but if you really look at the policies he backed, many were worse for blacks than those of the pre-civil rights days.” Hopkins pointed to Clinton’s welfare reform policies and the criticism of activist Randall Robinson of Clinton policies toward black Caribbean countries such as Haiti. (via DRUDGE REPORT 2008®)
The Republican plan to change the way California’s electoral votes are awarded is “virtually dead.” From the LA Times;
In an exclusive report to appear on this website late tonight and in Friday’s print editions, The Times’ Dan Morain reports that the proposal to change the winner-take-all electoral vote allocation to one by congressional district is virtually dead with the resignation of key supporters, internal disputes and a lack of funds. The reality is hundreds of thousands of signatures must be gathered by the end of November to get the measure on the June 2008 ballot. Although Maine (since 1972) and Nebraska (since 1996) award electoral votes to the popular vote winner in each congressional district, the California initiative ignited a national controversy with Democratic critics charging it was a power grab by Republicans who are regularly shut out of any California electoral votes by the current winner-take-all system. Democrats have won all the state’s 55 electoral votes in the last four presidential elections. It’s good to know this blatant attempt to split the Democratic power base in California has failed. I wonder how many other shady GOP projects are underway for 2008? http://indigentahole.blogspot.com Mike Kuykendall is a progressive, patriotic veteran of the U.S. Air Force, fighting hard to save our democracy.
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