Hillary's so desperate she's joined the right wing in attacking Obama

By Tom Teepen
Cox News Service
Friday, March 28, 2008

Apparently Hillary Clinton was finding the going against Barack Obama too tough, so she's switched to running against another, easier opponent. In common with right-wing talk radio, which is in full howl on the matter, she has started running against the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Wright, who recently retired, had been the longtime and often fiery pastor of the Chicago church that Obama attended for years. Videos of some of Wright's extremist rants virtually engorge conservative Web sites and are running on a near constant loop on cable TV.

A special favorite of conservatives has Wright calling on God to damn America for what the pastor judges to be its errancies. By extension, Obama is then judged to be unpatriotic.

Obama has firmly denounced the pastor's excesses but refuses to declare him wholly beyond the human pale, for which hesitation he is being, from the quarters you'd expect, ripped as a morally failed soul himself.

(I guess I'm one, too. Decades ago, I didn't leap to my feet and stomp out of the nave, as new-hatched partisan etiquette seems to require, when the minister at an Easter service took to inveighing against President Franklin Roosevelt for, as the minister had it, having been drunk at Yalta and selling America out to the Bolsheviks. Your hunch is as good as mine as to what that had to do with the risen Christ.)

Clinton's own people have surely run the numbers — and if not, she need only repair to any number of pundits who have consulted with their pocket calculators. She knows she can win the Democratic nomination only one way. She has to so thoroughly trash Obama that the party's superdelegates judge him no longer electable and overturn the preference of the party's primary voters.

In her worsening desperation, Clinton already had championed Republican nominee John McCain as more fit to be commander-in-chief than Obama — in which status she coincidentally placed herself, what with having imagined that she had once taken sniper fire in Bosnia.

Clinton had hung back from the Wright imbroglio for several days, but the temptation was just too strong, and now she has added her voice to the chorus of conservative scolds.

The game is to morph Obama in the public mind into a black nationalist radical — and never mind that his whole life story screams the contrary. That his responding speech on race was historic in its racial understanding and generosity has only incited greater labors for his denigration.

White preachers have been damning American to hell for its supposedly wanton ways from our Puritan get-go, and none of their many political congregants have been held fatally accountable by association.

Not long ago, remember, the televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson said we pretty much had 9/11 coming because we allow abortion and hadn't scourged gay and lesbian Americans. Politicians still were getting in the suck-up line.

On one matter, Clinton has stolen a march on Obama. He has been calling for a new politics that goes beyond mere partisanship. Clinton has pioneered there, the first candidate to praise the opposing party's nominee and to adopt some of its power points against her own party's likely nominee.

That's a really new politics.