Augusta Chronicle Editorial Staff
The overall tenor of Sen. Barack Obama's speech Tuesday -- a call to move Americans away from racial divides to concentrate on bettering our society -- is impossible to disagree with. After all, what rational person doesn't want that level of reconciliation in our nation?
Obama's speech was eloquent and even, and it offered a classic example of the senator's ability to appear as all things to all people. He said all the right things when it came to the issue of race. He rightly cited the issue as something that America can't afford to ignore, and an issue by which we can't allow ourselves to become overwhelmed.
But Obama's blunt assessment of the issue of race in the United States did little to publicly justify his close, longtime association with a minister who has fired off bigoted, anti-American tirades from the pulpit of Obama's own church.
Instead of completely cutting the cord with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama went through the odd contortion of simultaneously denouncing the Rev. Wright's words -- then embracing the man himself: "As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me."
But having "family" like this doesn't mean you have to keep inviting those odious people back to the reunions year after year.
Obama failed to adequately explain why he would sit in the pews of Trinity United Church of Christ for years and listen to a man with such racist, anti-American views. He tried to explain the different nature of the black worship experience -- but can Obama really write this off to white folks just not understanding black folks in church?
And even if he missed every radical statement made from the pulpit, surely when two people are as intimate as Obama and the Rev. Wright, he knew how the man felt and thought. Yet, he embraced him warmly until the light shone on the man. Wright has been given a pass that similar hate-peddlers would not be given.
Moreover, this isn't just about race. This is also about how one feels about America. The Rev. Wright obviously hates his country with a passion and a venom few of us have ever seen in this land. That will give many Americans pause -- perhaps in the primaries, but absolutely in the general election -- to consider voting for a man with friends and advisers such as this.
You lay down with dogs, you get fleas. And you have to wonder: Could a white politician denounce a racist's rants and still rub elbows with him?
Obama wants to write this off as an inaccurate "caricature" of Wright. Caricature? Caricature? We're talking about actual video and audio of him damning America and blaming whites for everything. That's not a caricature, which is someone's exaggerated sketch of someone else. This is Wright, up close and personal, and unplugged and in his own words.
Is this how Obama would level with the American people as president?
Obama on Tuesday candidly laid out the context of black anger over centuries of injustice. And that anger is justifiable. But racism and anti-Americanism is not -- especially in the poisonous style employed by the Rev. Wright.
There is a time for color to be set aside as a barrier, so people of all colors can work together to create a better America for everyone.
There also is a time to divorce oneself from the brand of hate that harms progress. For all of Obama's spot-on rhetoric, as long as the Rev. Wright is anywhere in the picture, a cloud looms over the senator's character that he will have to work much harder to dissipate.
