It seems that the days when Obama could not disown us in the black community are long gone, since he finally threw his spiritual mentor overboard, albeit twenty years too late. But are regular folks buying it? The new Rassmussen Reports poll that gauges citizen response to Obama’s sudden denouncement of Rev. Wright say “nice try, Mr. Obama.”
58% of voters say he denounced Rev. Wright to help himself politically, not out of real outrage.
52% believe Obama knew Wright so well that he could not have been surprised by Wright’s latest round of anti-White, anti-American ranting.
Only 7% of American voters agree with Wright’s views, but 56% say Obama shares at least some of Wright’s views. Just 11% say it’s “not at all likely” that he agrees with Wright.
And if Obama and his endorsers thought the story would blow over, good luck: 81% of voters say they are following the developments on Rev. Wright somewhat or very closely.
Obama staked his electability claims on his appeal to Independents and moderate Republicans. That appeal has vanished: 74% of Republicans believe Obama shares Wright’s views. Ominously for Obama, 48% of Democrats and 49% of Independents agree.
Obama once claimed he could “no more disown Wright” than he could “disown the black community.” The black community disagrees. Only 12% of Blacks agree with Wright’s views. 64% disagree.
This is pretty, pretty bad news for Obama and the superdelegates who support him. And what does it all mean? Well besides explaining Hillary’s surge in all national and local polling, these numbers indicate that Obama’s duplicity on Wright cost him the trust of a stunning cross-sections of the electorate.
Clearly, voters have tired of Obama’s dishonesty about his relationship with Rev. Wright. He went from claiming he’d never heard Wright’s invective, a claim easily disproved by listening to excerpts from his autobiography…
…to claiming that his church was not controversial, to claiming Wright was so close to him that he could distance himself from Wright’s remarks but not the man, to belatedly throwing Wright overboard but only when he could no longer face voter retribution for his poor judgment and poor choice for spiritual guidance.
Do the superdelegates really intend to prop-up a candidate who has quite clearly become unelectable, and whose alarming negatives could doom Democrats in swing- and red-states nationwide?
It is crystal clear that Obama’s denouncement of Wright was a massive fail on every level.
He contradicted and made a laughingstock of his race speech, validated those of us who have been critical of Wright for the past seven weeks, and made fools of the Wright-defending left wingers who make up his base. And that’s the best of it.
He also lied, saying Wright had never been his spiritual mentor — nevermind that Wright brought him to Black Jesus, married him, baptized his children, so inspired him that he named his bestseller after a Wright sermon, sat Wright on an advisory committee for his campaign until this March, and prayed with Wright before announcing his Presidential bid.
If there was any doubt left, this pitiful episode shows that Obama is a do-anything, say-anything political huckster. Note, his new outrage at Wright has nothing to do with Wright’s hate speech, but Wright’s assertion that Obama’s denunciations were political posturing is what upset Obama “the most.” How telling, and ironic, that one of the few things Wright has said that is true — that Obama is a typical lying politician — is the straw that broke the camel’s back in their long and abiding relationship…not any of Wright’s false anti-American, anti-White invective. Isn’t that a wee bit disturbing? Besides being oddly arrogant?
Having grown up in the black church, I knew from the get-go that Wright’s profane, insane rants would not have be tolerated by the elders in most black churches, so Obama had already lost me when he equated the black community with Rev. Wright in his Philadelphia race speech, wrongly selling the intellectually dishonest assertion that Wright’s angry prejudices represent mainline black thought. He could have and should have disowned Wright back then — or never at all — instead of throwing us all overboard (along with Geraldine Ferraro and his poor grandmama for good measure).
Obama did not learn anything new about Wright in the past week, except perhaps that Wright knew him for the opportunistic politician he (and now the voters) know he is. That, I suspect, was Wright’s real crime in Obama’s eyes.
Obama’s problem is that voters believed him the first time: no, Mr. Obama, you can’t shake Wright. Not after all this time lying about how much you knew about his views, contextualizing his hatred, and taking your kids to be indoctrinated in his church.
It would behoove the superdelegates and remaining Democratic primary voters to take note. Somebody with good sense better find a way for Hillary Clinton to win out fair-and-square. Obama may not even be a viable Vice-President option anymore. He certainly can’t beat McCain.
