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It was a textbook-level gaffe, meaning Ferraro said something impolitic — but true.
She resigned from whatever position she had with Hillary Clinton’s campaign and spent the next couple of days explaining herself on talk shows.
Meanwhile, Obama also has some explaining to do regarding his pastor.
Obama was supposed to be the transcendent candidate, the one who would move us all beyond race, but the race thing won’t go away, and how could it? The fact of Obama’s race is integral to his mystique and his political success.
As Mickey Kaus pointed out on his blog, kausfiles.com: “If Obama were white, he wouldn’t embody hopes of a post-racial future. Duh! That’s part of his appeal. It seems obvious. … Why isn’t Ferraro allowed to acknowledge it?”
The importance of Obama’s race becomes even more obvious when you consider that black voters comprise much of the Democratic electorate. Any candidate capable of capturing 80 to 85 percent of the black vote while grabbing a goodly share of the white vote will have the advantage.
That’s why Obama was probably the only candidate with the potential to beat Hillary. He’s doing it by yanking away what she formerly considered her base, and he’s doing it in part because he is black.
But now to the other matter, namely Obama’s pastor problem. Stories have been floating around the Internet for months about the sermons at Obama’s church, the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Pastor Jeremiah Wright, who announced his retirement last month, was well-known for his inflammatory sermons and anti-American outlook.
Obama’s response has been to soft-pedal the issue.
When it came out that Wright blamed the United States for the Sept. 11 attacks — “America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” the pastor declared — Obama simply disagreed and said Sept. 11 was without justification.
But there’s more.
ABC News reviewed of dozens of Wright sermons, which are sold to the public by the church. In a 2003 sermon, the network reported last week, the pastor said, in coarse language, that instead of singing “God Bless America,” black people should curse America.
“The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. ...”
ABC News says Obama declined comment, but a campaign spokesman said the senator has repudiated Wright’s remarks.
Everyone acquires at least some ideas by picking and choosing from various sources, cafeteria-style, without necessarily endorsing the entire menu. But Obama’s association with Wright goes way back.
Wright officiated at Obama’s marriage. While at Harvard law, Obama listened to recordings of Wright’s sermons. One of the paster’s 1988 sermons was the inspiration for the title of Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope.
Now Obama is campaigning to be president of the country that his pastor has portrayed as monstrously evil. The question is how much of this Obama has absorbed.
If the senator is to represent the nation’s post-racial future, at the very least he must disassociate himself from a man whose outlook remains mired in the identity politics we’d all like to transcend.
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