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     Tonya "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Tonya Post Number: 6917 Registered: 07-2006 Rating: N/A |
A Comparison Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan: By Karl Fleming chicagotribune.com March 30, 2008 Barring some event of staggering significance, Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for president. Many, though, believe Obama doesn't deserve it. His refusal to walk out of the Chicago church where his former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., made many incendiary remarks, including that AIDS was a white plot against blacks, render Obama too duplicitous and morally deficient to inhabit our highest office. Obama has offered a complex explanation, but one that does not include what was likely a powerful component for his sticking with Wright. That is, that walking away would have meant abandoning his strongest Chicago political constituency, thus making it impossible for him to get elected to his first political office. Obama was straight in his speech on race about being an imperfect candidate, not possessing the moral purity his fervid supporters have wished upon him. Hillary Clinton supporters, and many of the media's bloviators, say Obama's association with Wright fatally flaws him. Conservatives, of course, are now smacking their lips in anticipation of his candidacy. So just how wrong was Obama? What punishment, if any, does he deserve? Step back with me into recent history. I was one of the first reporters on scene in 1964 when three young civil rights workers, two Jewish kids from New York named Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and a black kid from Mississippi, James Chaney, disappeared near Philadelphia, Miss. They had driven down from a training school I'd attended in Oxford, Ohio, to prepare them for what was called Freedom Summer, the hoped-for final victorious assault on segregation in the country's most racist state. The morning after the first reports of their missing went out, I went with a colleague to the courthouse in Philadelphia and questioned the tobacco-chewing sheriff, Lawrence Rainey, and his pulpy-faced deputy, Cecil Price. They said that the three kids had been arrested on a traffic violation, briefly held in jail, but released at the county line. In the immediate days following, alarm spread and FBI agents were sent down by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. Hordes of national reporters arrived and national indignation grew. Mississippi's response was denial and defiance. The governor, Paul Johnson, and the state's notoriously racist senator, Jim Eastland, suggested that the kids were in Cuba, that this was nothing but a Communist plot to make Mississippi look bad. And when the kids' bodies—they had been brutally beaten and then shot—were found by the FBI buried in an earthen dam, Mississippi's nearly unanimous response was to say that as "outside agitators" the kids had brought their fate upon themselves. When the FBI implicated both the sheriff and his deputy, a few Klansmen also were indicted on federal charges of violating the victims' civil rights. A Mississippi jury turned them all loose. Not a single elected official, not a single significant business or religious leader in the state of Mississippi, decried this horrendous crime. The few courageous whites who spoke up were threatened, ostracized or literally run out of the state. Soon after, President Lyndon B. Johnson throttled official racism with the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts. Southern whites, led by Mississippi, bellowed in collective outrage in defense of so-called states' rights, and rapidly began to desert the Democratic Party. And it was in Philadelphia, Miss., at the annual Neshoba County Fair, that Ronald Reagan chose to kick off his campaign for president in 1980. "I believe in states' rights," he declared. "I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment." His message to Southern whites was intentional and clear: "Boys, I'm on your side." When he was governor of California and when he was president, Reagan opposed every single piece of civil rights legislation that came his way. Was Reagan a white racist? I reported extensively on his campaigns and knew him as well as any reporter could, which was, probably, not a lot, and I don't believe he was. But he did what he and his handlers thought was necessary to appease Southern whites. Was that morally wrong? Absolutely. Is Obama a black racist? Obviously not. In not leaving Wright's church, Obama did what Reagan did—not affront a powerful constituency. Was that morally wrong? Absolutely. Whose crime, though, was the more egregious? This is a fair question, because Reagan took very little heat from the allegedly liberal media, little from Democrats, and none at all from Republicans for his pandering in Philadelphia, Miss., which was a painful insult to every black and Jew in America. And since then, of course, Reagan has been elevated to something approaching sainthood by the Republican right. Will Obama get off so lightly? Not a chance. His failure to totally reject and repudiate Wright already has caused a national uproar, and if he wins the nomination, the Republicans certainly will "Swift Boat" and "Willie Horton" him relentlessly with Wright's more incendiary remarks, and with that photo of Obama with his arm draped over Wright's shoulder. And fair or unfair, this issue alone could well cost him the election. And if this is the conclusion to this unique chapter in American history, it will starkly validate Obama's brilliant dissection of the still festering problem of race in our country. Karl Fleming, the author of the recent memoir, "Son of the Rough South," is a former Newsweek magazine correspondent. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-oped0330reaganmar30,0,501473.stor y | ||
| Cynique "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Cynique Post Number: 11973 Registered: 01-2004 Rating: |
You could go even further back to the 1930s and 40s during FDR's era when Roosevelt's wife, Eleanor kept urging him to speak out against the lynchings in the South, and his reply to her was that he couldn't afford to alienate all of the Southern Democrats whose votes he needed to pass his New Deal programs. Jeremiah Wright may go down in history as the preacher who cost a black man the presidency because he chose to cast stones instead of forgive sinners. | ||
| Tonya "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Tonya Post Number: 6920 Registered: 07-2006 Rating: |
"...the Republicans certainly will "Swift Boat" and "Willie Horton" him relentlessly with Wright's more incendiary remarks, and with that photo of Obama with his arm draped over Wright's shoulder. And fair or unfair, this issue alone could well cost him the election." Nah. Republicans don't have a monopoly on ruthless campaigning anymore. Now the LEFT have unsavory players, dishonorable comrades & unscrupulous sociopaths of their own. Look at what they did to General Be-tray-us. Sick!! Wicked!! LOL!! I think the Swift-Boating this time will come from the left; and I think they're going to give McCain and his stiff-boating cronies a hard time. Most of these LW guys are younger (cooler & crueler, funnier, more creative), capable of connecting with a public demanding real change and a fresh start. Not so for the GOP's w/their flag printed depends, blue wigs, & stone rockers. |
