The Promise of Barack Obama

Nothing about Barack Obama is unmoderated. It is not surprising, therefore, that he has declined Hillary Clinton's challenge to debate in an unmoderated (and unscripted) format. Obama fears less to be perceived as a coward than to be exposed as a sham. There is no difference between Al Sharpton and Barack Obama except that Sharpton has been knocked-about and nearly killed for his opportunism whereas Obama has reaped prize after unearned prize.

Obama is an armchair revolutionary who harbors all the hates and resentments of those on the front lines of the racial divide but has been immured all his life from the effects of racism. His entire career thus far (such as it is) has been built on exploiting the exploited, siphoning their suffering to run his political juggernaut. One might say that in this he is no different from any other liberal of our times. No different, let us say, from Hillary Clinton.

But there is a difference: the next phase of his career will be spent exploiting the "exploiters," that is, those who favor his mother's side of the family. It is thus that he affirms his own "victimhood" and validates his own identity. It worked, on a smaller canvas, for his mentor and surrogate father figure, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who, incidentally, despite the mock African garb, is practically white, or, more precisely, black by choice.

Not even Obama's 85-year old white grandmother, who raised him after both his father and mother abandoned him, is exempt from his anger at whites, which is no different from Wright's except that Obama conceals it in meaningless rhetoric while Wright uses all his rhetorical tropes to highlight it. Still, in his speech on race, Obama publicly chastised his own grandmother as a bigot while asserting that he can still love his grandmother even if she is one; the implication being, of course, that he can love and forgive all whites for being bigots and terribly wronging him and his people. Yet, if Obama can regard his own white grandmother as a racist and publicly chastise her as such before the world — a woman who has given the most absolute proof that she is in fact not one — how must he feel about other whites who did not raise him?

For Obama as for Wright racism is the "original sin" of white Americans. Nothing can wash that "sin" out except, perhaps, an infusion of black blood. It appears to have done the trick for Obama himself, who on his mother's side is related to Jefferson Davis.

Quite apart from Obama's socialism, which Hillary shares to a lesser extent, and his inexperience, which Hillary also shares but which, in her case, is supplemented by her husband's (ominous) experience, the biggest difference between Obama and Clinton is that as president Hillary would not pick at the scars of racism until they become new festering wounds.

It is ironic that many Americans both black and white mistakingly believe that the election of Obama will signify the final reckoning with their history and the purification of the American ideal. In fact, the long settled questions of the American Civil War will be revisited and unsettled, and the real progress that has been made since will be threatened if not undone, if Barack Obama is elected president. Obama is the black George Wallace, only smarter and a better actor and hence even more dangerous.

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