DISTANCING NOT CALLED FOR

Now we have yet another flap about a preacher and Obama. Last Sunday, the Rev. Michael Pfleger, an Obama adviser, gave a tub-thumping speech at Obama's Chicago church in which he imnplied that Hillary Clinton believes she will win the Democratic nomination because of "white entitlement." Pfleger, a white Catholic priest who practices black liberation theology, is a regular guest speaker at Trinity United Church of Christ. Here is a description of how Pfleger mocked Clinton at the church:

Pfleger told the Trinity congregation, "We must be honest enough to expose white entitlement and supremacy wherever it raises its head."

He continued: "Reverand Moss (Trinity's new pastor), when Hillary was crying, and people said that was put on, I really don't believe it was put on. I really believe that she just always thought, 'This is mine. I'm Bill's wife. I'm white. And this is mine. I just got to get up and step into the plate.'

"And then out of nowhere came, hey, I'm Barack Obama. And she said, 'Oh damn, where did you come from? I'm white. I'm entitled. There's a black man stealing my show.'"

Pfleger then mimicked Clinton crying as the audience erupted into applause and gave Pfleger's remarks a standing ovation. In his sermon, Pfleger added, "She wasn't the only one crying. There was a whole lot of white people cryin'."

Obama was quick to distance himself from his friend by condemning Pfleger's remarks for their divisiveness. Devisive as they may have been, was there any truth to those remarks? While Pfleger may have gone a little overboard with his dramatic delivery, most of what he said had a certain ring of truth to it.

From the very beginning until well after Obama started to win most of the Democratic delegates, the Clinton campaign had been run on the basis of Hillary and Bill's belief that she was entitled to the presidency. Once they realized Obama was a formidable opponent, the Clintons resorted to a daily trashing of the young senator from Illinois. Both also played the race card, with Bill comparing Obama's campaign to the prior campaigns of Jessie Jackson and with Hillary championing working class whites.

Of course, the Pfleger speech is just one of several controversies that have embroiled Obama following remarks made by some of his friends and advisers. The most prominent controversy involved the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's inflammatory and hateful anti-white and anti-American sermons. After Wright's "God Damn America" diatribes appeared all over television, Obama claimed he had been unaware of the sermons because he was not in church when his pastor gave them.

Obama did not condemn his long-time friend and pastor's sermons until after it became apparent that his campaign was being badly hurt by Wright's hate mongering. However, he did not disassociate himself from Wright until after the reverend appeared on several television shows to justify his hateful remarks and to claim that when Obama condemned the sermons, he was just playing politics. And just today, a day late and a dollar short, it was revealed that Obama had finally quit his controversial church.

In my blog, APOLOGY NOT CALLED FOR (March 7, 2008), I quoted Samantha Power, one of Obama's foreign policy advisers, as she described Hillary Clinton: "She is a monster too ... she is stooping to anything. You just look at her and think: ergh. But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive."

Then there was the occasion when Austan Goolsbee, Obama's senior economic adviser, was reported to have told the Canadian Consulate General in Chicago that the Canadian government need not worry about Obama's campaign promises to opt out of NAFTA. Goolsbee reportedly told the Canadian official that the promises were "just campaign rhetoric not to be taken seriously."

Obama should not have found it necesssary to distance himself from Pfleger, Power, and Goolsbee as they were all calling their shots as they saw them. Power's description of Hillary Clinton was right on the mark. Goolsbee's reference to Obama's stance on NAFTA as mere campaign rhetoric was undoubtably true. And while Pfleger was somewhat overly dramatic in his scathing attack on Hillary, he nevertheless put the Clintons in their rightful place.

Obama was slow to repudiate Jeremiah Wright's inflammatory sermons and even slower to disassoiate himself from that hate mongering preacher. However, he was quick to distance himself from Pfleger, Power and Goolsbee. It's too bad political expediency ruled the day with Obama distancing himself from friends who told the truth and thought they were helping him in his campaign.