Posted on 03/18/2008 6:08:37 PM PDT by SJackson
The crazy uncles in Obama's attic': Will the black nationalists and white lefties who pushed Obama up the political ladder in Chicago prove to be a liability to his White House run?
March 18, 2008 | CHICAGO -- We were all wrong about Barack Obama's exotic past.
The same folks who once whispered that B. Hussein Obama was a mole for radical Islam are now decrying his links to an even more anti-American cult: the United Church of Christ.
And it wasn't Honolulu, or Jakarta, or Nairobi that put Obama in touch with folks supposedly bent on undermining heartland values. It was the heart of the heartland's biggest city: the South Side of Chicago, where Obama launched his political career. The South Side is responsible for the black nationalist preachers and violent radicals-turned-professors whose sound bites and rap sheets have now mired Obama in the worst patch of his presidential campaign. But without them Obama wouldn't have had a seat in the state Senate, much less a shot at the White House. And now the black street cred and lefty bona fides they provided, so crucial to Barack Obama's early local success, are proving corrosive to his national ambitions.
Obama suffered his biggest embarrassment of the campaign last week when his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was shown on ABC News changing the words of "God Bless America" to "Goddamn America."
Wright is the recently retired pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ. One of America's most liberal Protestant denominations, the UCC runs TV ads welcoming gays who can't find a pew elsewhere. With 8,500 members, Trinity United is its largest church. Wright built that congregation with a black Christian philosophy, which connected Bible stories to the struggles of an oppressed people. He was like an African-American rabbi, promoting his flock's pride in their heritage by preaching in a dashiki and organizing trips to Africa. He tended to their worldly needs with a day care center, a credit union and a drug and alcohol program.
As a young biracial man building a black identity, Obama found Wright's Afrocentrism appealing. The first time he visited the church, in 1985, he saw a "Free South Africa" sign on the lawn. With a sermon titled "The Audacity of Hope," Wright relieved Obama of his agnosticism, gave him the theme of his political career, and introduced him to the preaching style he uses so dramatically on the stump.
But joining a black mega-church was also a quick way for a young man on the move on the South Side of Chicago to address some gaps in his résumé.
In any American town, it's not uncommon for anyone launching a business enterprise that depends on name recognition and personal contacts to join the Lion's Club or the Rotary and one of the biggest churches on Main Street. In "Audacity of Hope," Obama is talking about networking when he describes what brought him to Wright's church in 1987.
He was a community organizer then, and one of the black ministers with whom he was consulting suggested that the work would go more smoothly if he joined a congregation. "It might help your mission," said the pastor, "if you had a church home ... It doesn't matter where, really." The pastor was talking about Obama's community organizing mission, but he was also giving him good advice about politics.
When Obama picked a "church home," he chose one that helped him with another weak spot in his biography. Before Obama joined Trinity United, Rev. Wright warned Obama that the church was viewed as "too radical ... Our emphasis on African history, on scholarship..." But Obama joined anyway. With that act, he had become significantly blacker -- and more like local voters. Part of the cultural divide between the half-Kenyan Hawaiian and his Chicago neighbors, most of them products of the Deep South's black diaspora, was bridged.
Twenty years later, Wright has been caught saying stuff that some black folks say when white folks aren't listening. Wright built one of the biggest congregations on the South Side with his black empowerment rhetoric. His parishioners didn't necessarily find it outlandish when he thundered that the U.S. government cooked up HIV as a form of inner-city genocide, or that America brought 9/11 on itself. The government hasn't always been a friend to blacks. Whites so seldom venture into black churches, however, they were shocked to hear Wright's politically inspired riffs.
It does not seem credible for Obama to claim equal surprise, to claim unfamiliarity with Wright's more aggressive opinions. Obama quoted Wright at length in "Audacity of Hope" -- and took the name of his book from one of the first sermons he heard Wright deliver. As he wrote in "Audacity of Hope," when he looked through the "Black Value System" that guided Wright's church, he saw "A Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness." That first sermon included a comparison of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in South Africa, which claimed 69 lives, to Hiroshima.
In fact, Obama seems to have known that Rev. Wright was not someone he could bring to Iowa. Last year, Obama asked his pastor to deliver the invocation before his presidential announcement in Springfield, Ill., then withdrew the offer. As white America learned more about Wright, Obama started comparing him to a crazy uncle. Finally, last Friday, he condemned his statements and kicked him out of the campaign. Wright did his final service to Obama by retiring on Feb. 11, a month before ABC aired his sermons.
But Trinity United is only part of Obama's South Side baggage. Wright may seem racially divisive; Hyde Park, the neighborhood north of Trinity United where Obama eventually settled, is about coexistence. In a city famous for de facto segregation, Hyde Park is biracial -- and intellectual, and earnest, and liberal unto the point of lefty. Hence the lesser of Obama's recent unpleasantnesses: Outside of a Politico article and some huffing and puffing on conservative blogs, the outrage over Obama's ideologically incorrect white friends has not reached Wright-ian proportions, but there is always time.
Walking past the brownstone two-flats on Woodlawn Avenue, you can hear the occasional Sonny Rollins riff unrolling from the open windows of the book-lined sun rooms. When Harper Court still had chess tables, you could watch black blitz hustlers smoke nerdy University of Chicago students, hooting, "I want them panties off!" as they swept away bishops and rooks. (The tables were torn up after the chess scene got too rowdy.) You can still lunch on the $6 mac and cheese at Valois Grill ("See Your Food"). Priced for the budgets of grad students and winos alike, it inspired the great book "Slim's Table," a study of the wary relationship between the campus and the ghetto. Hyde Park just lost its food co-op, but it still has one for the other essential of life: the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, an underground warren of books with colons in the titles, has sections devoted to "gender studies" and "epistemology."
Hyde Park's intellectual life has been dominated by two contradictory strains. The first is neoconservatism: Allan Bloom wrote "The Closing of the American Mind" at U. of C., and Paul Wolfowitz studied under Leo Strauss. The second and by far numerically superior force is the humorless liberalism that makes every elite campus such an anal-retentive place. Hyde Park is our most uptight neighborhood. In 1995, the Princeton Review named U. of C. America's "worst party school," inspiring this joke: "Q: How many University of Chicago students does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Quiet! I'm trying to study in the dark." The neighborhood invariably elects a goo-goo alderman who pulls killjoy stunts like, you know, asking to see what's in the mayor's budget before voting on it. The most famous, Leon Despres, who just turned 100, once spent five days at Trotsky's place in Mexico City. The only reason Hyde Parkers don't drive Volvos is that they're too long to parallel park.
Obama began teaching constitutional law at U. of C. in 1993. When he decided to run for state Senate, in 1995, his district encompassed Hyde Park, as well as the weary black neighborhoods to the west, with threadbare street corners that might hold a liquor store, or a chicken shack. (It did not include Trinity United.) One of his first campaign events was at the home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Ayers and Dohrn were the '60s most glamorous radical couple: the Bonnie and Clyde of the Weather Underground, they spent 11 years underground after an accidental bombing that destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse, killing three of their comrades. Ayers came from an upper-class background -- his father was CEO of Commonwealth Edison -- so when he came in from the cold, he didn't do prison time, the way some biker toolbox bomber would have. Instead, he became a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and a fixture in Hyde Park liberal circles. The outgoing state senator, Alice Palmer, introduced Obama to local activists at the home of Ayers and Dohrn. Obama later served with Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund, which supports projects in poor Chicago communities. Ayers is also a member of Public Square, which organizes events that combine arts with social justice.
"Bill and Bernardine are respected members of the community," says a friend of the couple. "He's extremely involved in education policy nationally."
Another acquaintance, though, calls him a "narcissist," because he promoted his memoir "Fugitive Days" by saying, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Ayers posed for Chicago magazine with an American flag wadded at his feet.
In Hyde Park, Obama also met Rashid Khalidi, who recently became the first Arab-American scholar to make the pages of the National Enquirer, where he was called "a harsh critic of Israel" in an article titled "Obama's Secrets."
In 2000, when Khalidi was a professor at U. of C., he held a coffee for Obama's congressional campaign. I was at the event, which Obama attended with his wife, Michelle, and their toddler Malia. Khalidi's wife, Mona, set out pita and hummus and Khalidi, a Christian Arab born in New York to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother, praised Obama in unaccented English. Khalidi was head of the Center of International Studies, so his support suggested Obama was a faculty darling. There was talk that year that Obama was backed by a "Hyde Park Project" -- a group of well-funded, mostly white intellectuals aiming to push him up the political ladder.
Khalidi is a proponent of a Palestinian state, and has represented Palestine at international conferences, but he also recognizes Israel's right to exist.
Like Ayers and Obama, Khalidi was a member of the Woods Fund board, where he granted $75,000 to the Arab American Action Network, which was run by his wife. The AAAN is a social service agency aiding Southwest Side Arabs, but the right-wing Web site World Net Daily nonetheless has insisted it is anti-Israeli. That wasn't radicalism, it was nepotism, Chicago style.
Obama's tenure as Hyde Park's state senator gave him two advantages he has used to become the Democratic front-runner. The first is his ability to build a biracial coalition. Representing the campus and the 'hood, Obama had to appeal to educated whites and inner-city blacks. Those groups are now the pillars of his presidential support. As a state senator, he promoted bills that pleased both constituencies: opposing racial profiling, reforming death penalty laws, stiffening ethics requirements for legislators, providing health insurance for poor children.
Obama has also benefited from the district's leftist, academic bent. In Hyde Park, he ran with a crowd that harshly opposed this country's policies in the Middle East. Khalidi has gone so far as to say "we owe reparations to the Iraqi people." When Obama spoke against the Iraq war in 2002, it was hardly a gutsy stand. (He didn't have to take a stand at all, since the Illinois General Assembly can't declare war on foreign countries.) But it looks good now next to Hillary Clinton's "aye" vote. Obama comes off as a principled progressive because he represented a district that demanded clean government and liberal social policies -- values cherished by activist Democrats.
To Obama's credit, he hasn't repudiated anyone from his past. His campaign strategist, David Axelrod, admits that Obama and Ayers are "friendly." And Obama denounced Wright's comments without rejecting the man himself. How can he? Wright played an important role in shaping him as a politician. Ayers and Khalidi nudged him along the way. To apologize for knowing them would be to apologize for who he is: an African-American, a Christian, a city dweller, an academic, a liberal. Most of those would be exotic qualities in a president. And maybe that's the real problem.
Where’s Ray Hannania when you need him?
He’s always good for a laugh.
Obama suffered his biggest embarrassment of the campaign last week when his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was shown on ABC News changing the words of “God Bless America” to “Goddamn America.”
::::::::
This, along with his hideous speech today, was the FINAL BIG EXPOSE’ of what this radical, America-hating, socialist is all about. Let us hope that McCain plays this to the hilt, and keeps the momentum up to expose this empty-suit, no-issues, socialist for what he really is.
New phrase to counter the “Uncle Tom” label...Uncle Jerry
He's been whining about smears against Obama for a couple months. His latest from yesterday. He was a better comedian than political commentator
HANANIA: Rev. Wright crosses line but is wrongly disparaged, For Immediate Release, March 15, 2008
Ray Hannania wrote an online novel called “White Flight.” Has he been saying anything lately about Obambi (other than what SJackson wrote).
I LOVED that place? Did Mr. G's close as well? Was HP Co-op replaced by Whole Foods or (worse) a Jewel store?
I remember when he was doing Marian Santos.
Ah, the good old days. Now he’s just a Pali shill.
I don't get down there too often, between Illinois' ban on concealed weapons and Michelle Obama's truely bizarre warning that as a black man her husband could be killed getting gas a couple miles from their home. White's presumably safe anywhere on the south side. I think Mr. G's is closed, and Treasure Island is going into the Co-op space.
I may have asked you this in the past, but I believe that Barry O actually lives near the Synagogue on 51st Street.
One sad note: A Nigerian student was murdered not too long ago not far from my old apartment.
Of course “Afrocentrism” isn’t leftist at all (unless “Eurocentrism” is also leftist). It’s simply rightwing Pat Buchanan blood and soil nationalism applied to Africa. “White leftists” in the US may hate themselves but white leftists in Ireland and Spain and Quebec are self-loving super-patriots.
My political roots are in the Chicago of the 1980s, the interregnum between the Mayor Daleys when racial politics threatened to tear apart the city. National politics -- Reagan, Iran-Contra, etc -- flew at the edge of my political radar, but I was extremely attentive to the ongoing saga of Chicago city politics. Harold Washington, Chicago's mayor from 1983 through 1987, was my first and strongest political icon. I was, and remain, extremely proud that the very first vote I cast in my life was for his re-election in the mayoral campaign of 1987.
Washington's substantial victory that year -- after squeaking to victory in 1983 against a previously unknown Republican, whose late surge to near victory was driven by racist fears of a black mayor by much of the white population of Chicago -- represented to me the defeat of the forces of racial divisiveness.
My formative years under the spell of Harold Washington's anti-machine, reformist, and racially unifying administration may help explain my affinity towards Barack Obama, whose career began in that same place and time. I was reminded of all this by a recent article in Salon by Edward McClelland, which is a very interesting look at Chicago's, and Harold Washington's, influence upon Obama during those years.
Here is an excerpt:
Ironically, Chicago became the political capital of black America because it was so racist. For most of the 20th century, it was the most segregated city in America. Blacks used to have a saying: "In the South, the white man doesn't care how close you get, as long as you don't get too high; in the North, he doesn't care how high you get, as long as you don't get too close." During the Great Migration, the refugees who rode up from Mississippi on the Illinois Central Railroad were crowded into the Black Belt, the South Side ghetto portrayed in Richard Wright's "Native Son." Because the black population was so concentrated, white politicians couldn't gerrymander it out of a congressional seat. One of De Priest's successors, William Dawson, was the most powerful black politician in America. He helped boot out the predecessor to Mayor Richard J. Daley, the current mayor's father, who bossed Chicago from 1955 to 1976. In return, Daley's machine rewarded Dawson with control of the entire South Side.For much more on the the tumultuous, transformative, years of Harold Washington's tenure in Chicago, listen to a great program from Ira Glass' This American Life, that was first aired in 1997 on the 10th anniversary of Washington's death.The politician who truly set the stage for Obama's rise was also a South Side congressman: Harold Washington, who was elected mayor of Chicago in 1983, beating two white opponents in the Democratic primary -- incumbent Mayor Jane Byrne and future Mayor Richard M. Daley. In the general election, the difference between Washington and his Republican opponent was black and white -- and nothing else. When Washington campaigned at a church in a Polish neighborhood, he was greeted with the grafitto "Die, Nigger, Die."
In New York, Obama read about Washington's victory and wrote to City Hall, asking for a job. He never heard back, but he made it to Chicago just months after Washington took office. In his memoir "Dreams From My Father," he wrote about walking into a barbershop and seeing the new mayor's picture on the wall. (It's probably still there. To this day, Washington's image is as revered by South Side blacks as St. Anthony of Padua's is by Italian Catholics.) The old men, who'd suffered a lifetime of slights by white mayors, saw in Washington a sign that the black community had finally arrived as a citywide power. Blacks may have run things in their own neighborhoods, but they were still crammed into dreary housing projects, and they sent their children to overcrowded schools -- while white schools just across the color line sat half empty. And of course, the big political jobs -- the state's attorney, the County Board president, the mayor -- had always been controlled by the Irish.
"Before Harold," the barber said, "seemed like we'd always be second-class citizens."
After too many triple cheeseburgers and deep-dish pizzas, Washington dropped dead of a heart attack in his second term. But the confidence he instilled in black leaders became a permanent factor in Chicago politics. His success inspired Jesse Jackson to run for president in 1984, which in turn inspired Obama, who was impressed to see a black man on the same stage as Walter Mondale and Gary Hart. Washington also strengthened the community organizations in which Obama was cutting his teeth, says Ransom. Obama's Project Vote, which put him on the local political map, was a successor to the South Side voter registration drive that made Washington's election possible.
"Everybody owes something to Harold Washington, because that was something they never thought could happen," Ransom says. "If Harold can be mayor, what can't we do? Obama talks about the audacity of hope. That audacity has grown into the notion that a black man can be president of the United States."
Before Washington, a black Chicagoan pol's highest aspiration was U.S. representative. After Washington, it became senator, and finally, president. Plenty of other cities have had black mayors -- Detroit, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, New York, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Baltimore -- but in none of those places have blacks achieved as much statewide political success. Chicago has two unique advantages, says political consultant Don Rose. First, it's in Cook County, which contains nearly half of Illinois' voters. Second, the local Democratic Party is a countywide organization. After Chicago's Carol Moseley Braun beat two white men to win the 1992 Democratic Senate primary, precinct captains in white Chicago neighborhoods and the suburbs whipped up votes for her in the general election.
"They had to go out and sell the black person to demonstrate that the party was still open," says Rose, who sees "direct links" from Washington to Moseley Braun to Obama.
"It was a hard-fought thing. If you use Harold Washington's election as the pivot point, what you begin to see is black politicians making challenges to the regular organizations, and then the organizations having to support them."
By the way, on that website, I learned that the Washington-Obama connection is embodied in David Axelrod, "a political advisor to Harold Washington during Washington's second mayoral race and who is also chief political and media advisor to Illinois Senator (and Presidential candidate) Barack Obama."
The good old days indeed. Note the article in post 14. Harold Washington, Council Wars, Axelrod and Obama beginning their careers.
No, but it's fair to equate most forms of liberation theology, and his Church is deep into liberation theology, to Marxism with religious tolerance, till a particular Priest was no longer of use, of course, in which case the death could be blamed on right wing militias. Who I admit did their damage as well. Given the eventual concentration of power under a marxist economic regieme, do these religious characters really think that power would be shared. At least Farrakhan has the sense to consolidate all his pipe dreams under the religious banner.
Gee, I thought Salon was out of business. I haven’t read anything from them since...er...the CLINTON administration:)
Of course “Afrocentrism” isn’t leftist at all (unless “Eurocentrism” is also leftist).
No, but it's fair to equate most forms of liberation theology, and his Church is deep into liberation theology, to Marxism with religious tolerance, till a particular Priest was no longer of use, of course, in which case the death could be blamed on right wing militias. Who I admit did their damage as well. Given the eventual concentration of power under a marxist economic regieme, do these religious characters really think that power would be shared. At least Farrakhan has the sense to consolidate all his pipe dreams under the religious banner.
But how "leftwing" is "liberation theology" if it is combined with religious fundamentalism? And while Wright may not do this, certainly most Black churches, even the most angry, still subscribe to a fundamentalist interpretation of chr*stianity. And even if Wright isn't one of these, he still uses the fundamentalist preaching style (like Jim Jones did as well). Of course, this is supposed to be "authentic Black culture," but it is in fact authentic Southern culture.
Western leftists have a long history of not making the demands of the "oppressed" that they do of everyone else. In the nineteenth century it was quite common for radical Irish nationalists (who were also Marxists) to be orthodox Roman Catholics and for other Marxists to be fine with this. Why? Because Irish Catholics were an oppressed culture and therefore exempt from the traditional Marxist critique of religion. This is the same reason Black Fundamentalists, islamocommies, and "indigenous peoples" are exempt from the same critique today.
Disavowing the pursuit of (at least) middleclassness is exactly what's wrong with the urban underclass.
They are "taught" to not even try to better themselves through the mobility of American society.
Oh great. People who bombed schools and publicly advocated school violence are respected members of the national education curcuit. Obama's too dumb to understand what's wrong with this picture. Sick, sick, sick.
I'm not a big fan of the "left-right" characterization. Combining marxism with tolerance for the religious but economically oppressed, you'll end up with a centralization of power and denial of liberty, whether we call it communism, left, or fascism, right.
Authentic Southern culture, hadn't thought of that, but you're probably right. I could see a white demon like Al Gore emulating the Reverend's style.
Of course, being a story written by a slightly agitated leftist, the author tries to preserve some bit of dignity for Ayers and Dohrn by ignoring the bombing and killing at the University of Wisconsin that their group was responsible for.
Ask any bunch of African immigrants about how they are fitting in in the USA and you will soon find out they are not accepted by the "Afro-Centric Americans."
And regret they didn't do more.
Since you bring up pictures, here's a couple.
The Obama's supping with Edward Said, prominent academic. Looks like a good time being had by all. Wonder what they're talking about.
Edward Said on vacation, throwing rocks at Jews, which is what academics do on vacation. Some academics
Would it be fair to ask candidate Obama his impression of the good Professor Said, and what he thinks of throwing rocks at Jews?
Is it ever. And that's Rev. Wright's message. I don't see it as Obama's, I'm not sure what his message is in that regard, but he signed onto the Wright agenda two decades ago, so the burden of rejecting it is his.
Video from the new pastor of TUCC, Otis Moss on the principle of transformation.
Still to come, the church's connection to bomb throwing terrorists and Clinton's pardon of Puerto Rican terrorists.
Osama's speech attributed the Constitution's Preamble to The Declaration of Independence. This coming from a supposed Constitutional lawyer.
This was not a mistake. Osama is a revolutionary. The Declaration of Independence announces a revolution.
Unfortunately, The Declaration does not address "equality"; that's The Constitution.
Osama is all about revolution.
yitbos
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There used to be a First United Church of Christ in my neighborhood. Really. The never used their full acronym but went by First UCC.
....and all these leftist scumsuckers ‘forget’ to mention that the bomb that blew up that Greenwich Village townhouse was meant to blow up in the middle of a dance at Ft. Dix, NJ where it could have slaughtered dozens or hundreds of US soldiers and their dates. It was pure ‘luck’ (though ill luck for them) that the Weatherfreaks did not manage to kill large numbers of innocent people in their terrorist campaign against America.
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