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Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
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Nov. 19, 2009
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Nov. 18, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: What Judaism has to say about the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review May 2, 2008 / 27 Nissan 5768

Obama: Too Little, Too Late

By Linda Chavez


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | You could see the pain, anger and frustration in Sen. Barack Obama's face this week as, once again, he had to answer questions about his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. What you didn't see or hear from Obama was recognition that he could have prevented Wright from becoming an issue in the first place. But by the time Wright took to the podium at the National Press Club Monday to re-issue his hateful comments about the United States, Obama had already missed his chance. In fact, there were at least three specific occasions on which Obama made the wrong choice.


His first opportunity to avoid being tarnished occurred long ago when the young Barack Obama picked Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ. We know what a younger Obama was thinking when he chose Wright's church because he wrote about it almost 15 years ago in his first memoir, "Dreams from My Father." He describes in vivid detail his first meeting with Wright, whom he quotes as warning him: "Life's not safe for a black man in this country, Barack. Never has been. Probably never will be."


Apparently these words didn't set off warning lights. To the contrary, the young, Ivy-League educated Obama, who had been raised in Hawaii by his white grandparents and attended prep school there, seemed to be seeking a vicarious sense of victimhood in Wright's church. Obama describes, approvingly, a congregation in which "the flow of culture now ran in reverse as well; the former gang-banger, the teenage mother, had their own forms of validation — claims of greater deprivation, and hence authenticity, their presence in the church providing the lawyer or doctor with an education from the streets." Obama's choice of churches was as much political as it was spiritual, a form of religious "radical chic."


Obama missed his second chance to keep Wright at bay when he decided to run for president. Campaign aides warned Obama that his association with Wright was going to cause him trouble; so, on the eve of his presidential announcement, Obama withdrew his invitation to Wright to give the benediction at the ceremony. If he'd left it at that, Obama might at least have been able later to say that he had grown apart from Wright, or had outgrown him, or had come to see that Wright's message was incompatible with his own. But instead, he invited Wright to come to the announcement but to stay in the basement, out of sight of cameras, where he could pray privately with the senator and his wife. His own actions now make Obama look not only ambivalent about Wright, but duplicitous.


But Obama's greatest missed opportunity to break with Wright came after Wright's crazy rants first hit the airwaves in March. Instead of denouncing Wright in his famous Philadelphia speech, again Obama tried to have it both ways: he renounced Wright's words, but not the man. "I can no more disown him," Obama said, "than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."


But Obama's comparison of a race-baiter who spewed hatred from the pulpit with his elderly grandmother who had voiced her fears in private was not only morally asymmetrical, it was dishonest. Once more, the candidate's first memoir is revealing. In that version, a younger Obama explained his grandmother's fears by describing an actual incident that provoked them: While she was waiting for the bus to go to work early one morning, a black man tried to shake her down for money. She gave him some, but he kept demanding more. "If the bus hadn't come, I think he might have hit me over the head," Obama says she told him. Obama should have used this story in his speech on race to talk about the legitimate fear that crime evokes. Instead, he gave short shrift to his grandmother, while engaging in an extended apologia on the historical roots of Wright's rage in slavery and Jim Crow.


By the time Obama finally got around to denouncing Wright, not just his words, it was too little, too late. The Wright controversy had revealed a major character flaw in a candidate whose entire appeal has been based on character.

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JWR contributor Linda Chavez is President of the Center for Equal Opportunity. Her latest book is "Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics". (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.)

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© 2006, Creators Syndicate

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