Poll: Obama opens biggest lead over McCain

Dem leads rival by 10 points among registered voters in NBC/WSJ survey

By Mark Murray | Deputy political director | NBC News | 10/21/08

WASHINGTON - With voters’ increased confidence in his ability to serve as commander in chief, as well as a majority who now believe he would do a good job as president, Barack Obama has opened up his biggest advantage over John McCain in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

With two weeks to go until Election Day, Obama now leads his Republican rival by 10 points among registered voters, 52 to 42 percent, up from 49 to 43 percent two weeks ago.

Obama’s current lead is also fueled by his strength among independent voters (topping McCain 49 to 37 percent), suburban voters (53 to 41), Catholics (50 to 44) and white women (49 to 45).

In early September, after the Republican National Convention, McCain was ahead with independents and Catholics, and narrowly trailed Obama among suburban voters.

“To me, the voters have reached a comfort level with Barack Obama,” says Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, who conducted the survey with Republican pollster Neil Newhouse. “The doubts and question marks have been erased.”

Newhouse adds, “Obama’s beginning to meet a threshold of acceptance among voters.”

Palin’s drag on the ticket?
That doesn’t appear to be the case with McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin. Fifty-five percent of respondents say she’s not qualified to serve as president if the need arises, up five points from the previous poll.

In addition, for the first time, more voters have a negative opinion of her than a positive one. In the survey, 47 percent view her negatively, versus 38 percent who see her in a positive light.

That’s a striking shift since McCain chose Palin as his running mate in early September, when she held a 47 to 27 percent positive rating.

Now, Palin’s qualifications to be president rank as voters’ top concern about McCain’s candidacy - ahead of continuing President Bush’s policies, enacting economic policies that only benefit the rich and keeping too high of a troop presence in Iraq.

By comparison, voters’ top concerns about Obama include, in order:

• Being too inexperienced.
• Being too liberal.
• Raising taxes on some Americans.
• Being too influenced by people like his former pastor Jeremiah Wright and the ‘60s radical Bill Ayers.

Hart argues that voters have turned against Palin. The negative opinions of her have “reflected badly on McCain and essentially hurt the ticket dramatically.”

Obama’s strengthened standing
The poll — conducted of 1,159 registered voters from Oct. 17 to 20, and with an overall margin of error of plus-minus 2.9 percentage points — comes after the presidential debates and in the midst of Colin Powell’s public endorsement of Obama on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Those events appear to have strengthened Obama’s standing with voters. Forty-eight percent say they have confidence in Obama serving as commander in chief, which is nearly identical to the 50 percent who said the same of McCain.

A month ago, however, just 42 percent said they were confident in Obama’s commander in chief abilities, compared with 53 percent for McCain.

Moreover, 56 percent say they are either “optimistic or confident” or “satisfied and hopeful” that Obama would do a good job as president. Only 44 percent say that of McCain.

And now 55 percent believe that Obama shares their background and values, which isn’t far off from the 57 percent who believe the same about McCain.

On the issues and candidate qualities
In the survey, Obama also holds commanding leads on the issues — especially economic ones. He has a 39-point advantage over McCain in handling health care (59 to 20 percent), a 21-point edge on improving the economy (49 to 28), a 21-point lead on the mortgage and housing crisis (45 to 24), a 17-point edge on dealing with the Wall Street crisis (42 to 25), a 14-point lead on taxes (48 to 34) and a 12-point advantage on energy and the cost of gas (44 to 32).

McCain, meanwhile, holds advantages on which candidate would do a better job in catching Osama bin Laden (39 to 19 percent) and handling the situation in Iraq (45 to 40).

McCain also narrowly leads in having strong leadership qualities needed to be president (40 to 36 percent). But Obama has the edge in offering hope and optimism (53 to 23), improving America’s standing in the world (51 to 31) and having the right temperament to be president (50 to 30).

One other key advantage for Democrats is the enthusiasm gap. Fifty-two percent of Obama voters in the poll say they’re excited to be voting for the Democratic presidential nominee.

That’s compared with just 26 percent of McCain voters who said that about the GOP nominee, a percentage that’s down eight points since the Republican convention in early September.

Winning the base, but losing the middle
Hart, the Democratic pollster, believes there is one good sign for McCain in the poll: The Arizona senator is holding on to the GOP base. McCain has a sizable advantage over Obama among evangelicals (76 to 20 percent), small town/rural voters (53 to 40), and those living in the South (54 to 40).

But what the poll shows is that McCain — with 14 days until Election Day — has lost ground with independent and swing voters, Hart says.

“If you don’t win the middle in America, you don’t win the election."

October may yet yield a surprise

by Lisa Van Dusen | October 16, 2008

The October surprise has become such a reliable element of U.S. presidential elections that the most surprising October surprise between now and the end of the month would be no surprise at all.

But with Barack Obama 14 points ahead of John McCain in some polls with less than three weeks to go until Nov. 4, with the Straight Talk Express veering like a runaway beer truck, and with few obvious traditional strategic, tactical or voodoo options left available to the Republicans, guessing what an October surprise might look like has become the new parlour game.

Will Rev. Jeremiah Wright stage a four-night Vegas comeback run the week before the election? Will the FBI, the CIA and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms announce during a live remote media availability that Osama bin Laden has been hiding out with Bill Ayers in the Roanoke, Va., Holiday Inn directly behind them?

Like the Great Pumpkin, nobody has ever been able to prove the October surprise really exists, which only enhances its enormous mythical status in the imaginations of pollsters, consultants, reporters and commentators.

The term October surprise was first used publicly during the 1980 campaign by Republican vice-presidential candidate George H.W. Bush.

The Democratic incumbent, Jimmy Carter, had been battered by the nightly national nightmare of Ted Koppel reporting on the unchanging status of American hostages being held in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Republican challenger Ronald Reagan's surrogates, including campaign director William Casey, feared an 11th-hour game-changing hostage deal. So Bush pre-emptively portrayed any pre-election release as a cynical vote-getting tactic.

SAVVY CARTER

"All I know is there's a concern, not just with us but I think generally amongst the electorate, well, this Carter's a politically tough fellow," said Bush, in all apparent seriousness. "He'll do anything to get re-elected and let's be prepared for some October surprise."

It was Casey who had first used the term privately (according to language guru and former Richard Nixon speechwriter William Safire) in 1968, when he was working for Nixon, to anticipate another October surprise that never happened -- a Vietnam peace deal by outgoing president Lyndon Johnson to help Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate.

The 1980 October surprise, which is considered the granddaddy of October surprises, turned out to be a January surprise when the hostages were released 20 minutes after Reagan was inaugurated.

Allegations that Reagan's people had negotiated with the Iranians to hold a release until after the election while accusing the Democrats of doing the same thing were never proven but, if true, would make the first October surprise not only notable for its absence, but one of the most awesome examples of electoral psychological counter-projection ever.

In 2004, John Kerry was ahead in the polls on Oct. 29, when Osama bin Laden released what was basically a campaign commercial reminding voters of the 9/11 attacks and that he was still at large. Overnight, President George W. Bush opened a six-point lead heading into Election Day.

SCANNING THE SKIES

These days, the term October surprise has come to include everything, orchestrated or not, from natural disasters to a candidate's runny nose and the Republicans are scanning the skies and praying for something, anything, to land with a thud between now and Halloween.

It's hard to imagine what that might be. Maybe an un-American terrorist trifecta tape of Wright, William Ayres and bin Laden having brunch together on the Upper West Side.

Was Jeremiah Wright's speech set up by a Clinton supporter?

Well, here's a most interesting connection we just came across.

Everybody is talking today about how much the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's latest unrepentant militant remarks hurt his most prominent parishoner, Sen. Barack Obama, and his chances to win the Democratic presidential nomination and the general election. So much so that the Obama camp realized the latent danger overnight and the candidate was forced to speak out publicly a second time today, as The Ticket noted here earlier today.

There was little doubt left in today's remarks by Obama, who recently said he could no more disown Wright than he could the black community. He pretty much disowned Wright today. Obama described himself as "outraged" and "saddened" by "the spectacle of what we saw yesterday."

But now, it turns out, we should have been paying a little less attention to Wright's speech and the histrionics of his ensuing news conference and taken a peek at....

who was sitting next to him at the head table for the National Press Club event.

It was the Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, a former editorial board member of USA Today who teaches at the Howard University School of Divinity. An ordained minister, as New York Daily News writer Errol Louis points out in today's column, she was introduced at the press club event as the person "who organized" it.

But guess what? She's also an ardent longtime booster of Obama's sole remaining competitor for the Democratic nomination, none other than Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. It won't take very much at all for Obama supporters to see in Wright's carefully arranged Washington event that was so damaging to Obama the strategic, nefarious manipulation of the Clintons.

Their supporter, Reynolds, helps arrange a speech by the outspoken and egocentric Wright which receives blanket national coverage to the disadvantage of Clinton's opponent. As Louis writes: "The Rev. Jeremiah Wright couldn't have done more damage to Barack Obama's campaign if he had tried. And you have to wonder if that's just what one friend of Wright wanted."

Reynolds has not returned e-mails or phone calls seeking comment, but Louis notes the obvious conflict between her political allegiance and her press club arrangements. He quotes a February blog entry of Reynolds saying, "My vote for Hillary in the Maryland primary was my way of saying thank you" to Clinton and her husband for his administration's successes.

In another entry, Reynolds notes critically of Obama, "It is a sad testimony that to protect his credentials as a unifier above the fray, the senator is fueling the media characterization that Rev. Dr. Wright is some retiring old uncle in the church basement."

Louis notes himself about the Wright appearance: "It's hard to exaggerate how bad the actual news conference was. Wright, steeped in an honorable, fiery tradition of Bible-based social criticism, cheapened his arguments and his movement by mugging for the cameras, rolling his eyes, heaping scorn on his critics and acting as if nobody in the room was learned enough to ask him a question."

--Andrew Malcolm

Obama Holds Press Conference in Winston-Salem, North Carolina - Completely Distances Himself From Jeremiah Wright's Latest Comments

ABC Presidential Debate: Tabloid America

When I was a kid many of us from the neighborhood would band together and play the kids from the school basketball team in a game of horse, or one-on-one. Occasionally the star of the team would show up and it soon would become a game of one-on five.

Just like last night's debate sponsored by that bastion of journalism, ABC.

A few questions to consider:

1. How do you allow George Stephanopoulos, a former Clinton administration staffer now masquerading as a journalist, anywhere near a debate that includes Hillary Clinton?

2. How was it that ABC camera operators did nearly a dozen close-up shots of Chelsea and other Clinton supporters during statements by Hillary? (note that ABC even lit Chelsea's row with soft yellow light) How was it that there were no shots of Obama family or supporters during the event?

3. How can you moderate the first fifty minutes of a debate with no questions of policy and issues? How is it that the majority of those questions were directed at Senator Obama concerning his past associations and statements - save one question for Hillary on Bosnia?

4. How is it that Hillary admits she has lied about Bosnia and there is not one follow-up question from Charlie or George?

5. How are there no questions during the entire debate about Mark Penn, Columbia, the Clinton income taxes, or any exploration of Bill's relationship to Columbia?

I could go on and on - but what's the point? ABC conducted a hatchet job of a debate and should lose their license to broadcast anything.

Charlie Gibson should be ashamed of himself, as he knows better.

All in all, Obama, playing against a stacked deck of Clinton, Stephanopoulos, Gibson, McCain, and the phantoms of tabloid innuendo - did a fine and noble job.

One might say, he looked Presidential.

zjm

P.S. The good, just, and bemusing news - American Idol drew millions more viewers than ABC'S bad popcorn show -

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.

Vital words for Today, Tomorrow, and the Remainder of Campaign 08

Clinton Attacks On Wright
25 Mar 2008 01:47 pm

As the campaign goes on, the more you see who she is. The polling has not damaged Obama as she hoped, so she will now make Rove's and Hannity's strategy hers:

"He would not have been my pastor," Clinton said. "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend."

I'm not a Democrat and I know how vile the Clintons are. But this really is a new low. I think it is becoming a national imperative to defeat the Clintons.

Obama owes no apology for his pastor's sermons

March 23, 2008

By Andrea Collier Post-Tribune columnist

My husband has a 5-year-old nephew who says "you're riling me" when he thinks people are deliberately stressing him out. When it comes to race, America, you are riling me.

This past week we have demanded that a presidential candidate get off point in terms of what he wants to do to run this country to fight for his political life and cut his friend off at the knees in the case of Barack Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. We demand this so we can feel comfortable, all because we don't know how to dialogue about our differences and the way our country has dealt with those differences.

I write this from a hotel that faces the Fox Theater in Atlanta. It is the historic theater where, at the premier of "Gone With The Wind," where the colored people had to see the movie in the balcony -- including the woman who would win an Oscar for her performance. It is also the place where much of the Rev. Martin Luther King's strategy was formed. It occurs to me that if there had been CNN or YouTube tracking his every word, history may have judged him in a harsher light. It also reminds me that for years, the King was viewed by whites as a threat to American society.

When I was a kid in the late '50s and early '60s, we went to church on Sunday to talk about God. But we also went to church in the evenings to paint flyers, to hear speakers and to get fired up. I was a little girl fired up. "What do we want? Freedom!," I'd say holding a picket sign. "When do we want it? Now." I am ever aware that generations of my family paid a high price for me to enjoy the life I live now. I never take it for granted. All over this country, it was the preachers who would give passionate speeches and make bold calls to action. For us, the American dream was born and realized in the basements of the black churches. The fear of the dream realized made people burn churches, bomb them -- in my lifetime.

If Wright has said things to offend white America, it is up to him to apologize -- or not. I remind you that Clinton supporter Geraldine Ferraro has said much about race. And she was very clear that she meant it. Not only did she get a pass, but nobody is holding Clinton's feet to the fire for what she said.

So, in 2008, America is outraged at an old-school preacher who speaks about the country as he sees it. We have tried to force Obama into a Sophie's choice of sorts. Choose. Discredit. Distance. Whatever we are so mad about, Obama didn't say it. He doesn't need to apologize for it. We all have relatives, friends, and ministers that we don't agree with all the time. But we know that we don't have to erase them from our lives to be seen as a viable, respectable human being--unless you are a black man running for president. Because if you are going to be a viable candidate, we need to know that your life is free of any black people who still have anger or hurt at the past. You can't associate with anybody who is so frustrated at the slowness of the progress.

I am black. I am a woman. I am a mother, a daughter, a wife and a friend. To discount any of these things is to diminish who I am. I am a citizen of the world and want to leave it in a better place than when I arrived here. No apologies necessary.

Andrea King Collier is a Gary native who lives in Lansing, Mich.

Obama's Lincoln Moment

From the Los Angeles Times

Never before has a candidate for national office spoken so frankly about race in America.

Tim Rutten March 19, 2008

One hundred and fifty years ago this June, a lanky Illinois lawyer turned politician gave a speech that changed the way Americans talked about the great racial issues of their day.

The lawyer was Abraham Lincoln, and the speech was the famous "House Divided" address with which he accepted the Republican Party's nomination as a candidate for the U.S. Senate. Lincoln lost to Stephen Douglas, but the address changed the national conversation on slavery and, two years later, Lincoln was on his way from Springfield to the White House.

America's political story is studded with such addresses -- historical signposts that divide that which went before from all that followed on an issue of crucial national importance. Franklin Roosevelt's "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" speech fundamentally changed Americans' expectations of their government in times of social and economic crisis. John F. Kennedy's address on Catholicism and politics to the Greater Houston Ministerial Assn. in 1960 forever altered the way we think about religion and public office.

Sen. Barack Obama, another lanky lawyer from Illinois, planted one of those rhetorical markers in the political landscape Tuesday, when he delivered his "More Perfect Union" speech in Philadelphia, near Independence Hall. The address was meant to dampen the firestorm of criticism that has attached itself to the senator's campaign since video clips of race-baiting remarks by his Chicago church's former pastor began circulating last week.

But instead of offering a simple exercise in damage control, Obama chose to place his discussion of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright's incendiary comments in a wider consideration of race in America -- and the results were, like those Kennedy achieved in Houston, historic.

Just as every seasoned political hand in 1960 knew that, sooner or later, Kennedy would have to tackle the question of his Catholicism head-on, it's been clear for some time that Obama would have to speak explicitly to the question of race in this campaign. Still, polished orator that he may be, no one could have predicted an address of quite this depth and scope.

"That was the most sophisticated speech on race and politics I've ever heard," said CNN's Bill Schneider, the only network pundit who actually has taught American political history at elite universities.

It was all the more remarkable because, while Kennedy presided over what may have been the greatest speech-writing team in electoral history, Obama -- like Lincoln -- wrote his address himself, completing the final draft Monday night.

Obama did what he had to do, unequivocally repudiating Wright's extreme rhetoric. But what was truly radical about his analysis was his implicit demand that black and white Americans accept the imperfection of each other's views on race. Embedded in such acceptance is the seed of that "more perfect union" toward which this country -- unquestionably great but itself imperfect -- must strive.

It was a concept that Obama subtly invoked near the beginning of the speech by pointing to the fact that although the Constitution "was stained by the original sin of slavery," the "answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution -- a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time."

Theologically, original sin is the source of man's fallen nature and the root of his imperfection. Obama went on to build on that concept, invoking the authority of his own mixed heritage -- son of a black immigrant father and white mother, raised by a loving white grandmother -- and refusing to reject either Wright, a man of good works as well as extreme rhetoric, or his loving grandmother, who was prone to racial stereotypes. Obama demanded that black anger make an allowance for white anxiety and that white resentment make a place for black grievance.

No candidate for national office has ever spoken so candidly or realistically about race as it is lived as a fact of life in America. As he put it Tuesday, "The profound mistake of Rev. Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country ... is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past."

A Moving Moment in our Nation's History

March 19, 2008

Are we listening, America? On Tuesday morning, Barack Obama delivered the speech of his life about the most divisive issue in America in this day or any day -- race. He spoke for millions of Americans of good will and open minds -- Americans who have struggled to find just these words -- challenging us to heal our painful racial wounds by first admitting the deep roots, complexities and truths of our grievances. The grievances of black America are not imaginary, he said. And the anger and frustrations within segments of the white community cannot always be dismissed as bigotry.

Speaking to white Americans, Obama said, "The path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people."

But speaking to African Americans, Obama had this to say about resentful white people: "When they are told to bus their children to a school across town, when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job ... when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time."

Until all of us come to understand this more tangled truth about race in America and "work through" it, as Obama said, we will never seriously take on the great problems that trouble us all.

"If we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners," Obama said, "we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education or the need to find good jobs for every American."

In the last two weeks, issues arose on the campaign trail that threatened to recast Obama as "the black candidate" rather than as a candidate who happens to be black (and white, for that matter). Most alarming were the indisputably objectionable remarks of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Race moved to centerstage and was seized on by some to confuse and divide us. So Obama, in that exceptional way he has of brushing aside polemics, stepped up to a podium in Philadelphia and challenged us to see all the shades of gray, to embrace our greater and shared humanity.

It was a moving moment in American history to hear a man who could be president dissect the rancorous matter of race with such candor, and it called to mind other piercing addresses by the likes of FDR, Kennedy and King.

Obama's speech won't sway everybody -- within two hours Rush Limbaugh was sneering that Rodney King said it just as well with "Why can't we all just get along." But among those Americans who sincerely yearn for relief from the divisive and diversionary politics of the last couple of decades, this was a speech to move the head and heart.

Running for president inevitably is an act of self-revelation, and with this speech Obama peeled off many more layers and revealed something close to his true essence. He is the man in the middle, bi-racial and bi-cultural, inclined by both nurture and nature to understand if not always forgive both sides. He rightly denounced the many offensive comments by Rev. Wright, yet he refused to disown Wright or his overall message of self-determination.

"I can no longer disown him than I can disown the black community," Obama said. "I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother, a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me ... who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

What American does not see his own family and community -- and perhaps himself -- in that confession?

Obama on Tuesday spoke to our better angels.

And maybe America moved a little.

Invited to Wrestle in a Racial Mud Pit, Obama Soars Above It - The Washington Post

By Courtland Milloy, Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Before Barack Obama took to the podium yesterday, I was pretty angry at how slimy the presidential campaign had become. And my plan was to write a screed about those whites who want Obama to "transcend race" while they get to hold on to their racist ways.

In the latest episode, inflammatory snippets of sermons by Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of the Trinity United Church of Christ Church in Chicagp, had been fashioned into a political bombshell by Obama's opponents. Right-wing TV commentators then detonated it with ignorant vitriol, including an insinuation by Pat Buchanan that Wright was a black David Duke, the former leader of the white terrorist organization known as the Ku Klux Klan, and that Obama was the disciple of a hateful man.

I could go on and on.

Then Obama spoke, and I had a mind-altering experience. After hearing him deliver what was essentially a treatise on faith, hope and charity, I no longer wanted to risk getting stuck in a racial tar pit with Buchanan or any of the others. I just wanted to hop on that Obama bandwagon and head for new America.

The desire to rise up out of the racial muck was intensified with every conversation I had about the speech.

Rep. Elijah E Cummings (D-Md.), who co-chairs the Maryland for Obama campaign, hit the nail on the head when he told me: "Obama has the ability to elevate our thinking beyond the chicken-yard scratching and biting. He calls on us to soar like eagles. And if he can't always take you there, he can sure dare you to go."

Edwin Chapman, an African American physician who lives in Mitchellville, said: "The big challenge for Obama was not to be portrayed as the black candidate and not to be perceived as denying his blackness. It would not have worked if he had done like Tiger Woods and called himself a 'cablinasian.' It worked because Obama came off as a Renaissance man."

Another friend, Sidney Strickland, an African American attorney and co-founder of a bank in Laurel, said: "He spoke frankly about the racial divide, the gap in black and white perceptions of reality. And because of his personal story, rooted in having a black father and white mother, he was able to offer himself as the bridge."

Yet, as Obama made clear in the speech, the racial gap is huge, and it would be a stretch indeed for anyone to even imagine that it could be spanned entirely by one man in a lifetime. He certainly knew about the breadth of the gap inside my head.

"Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race and racism continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways," he said. "The memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away, nor has the anger and the bitterness. . . . That anger is not always productive. Indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems. . . . But the anger is real, it is powerful, and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm."

Then Obama went on to say something that almost made me audaciously hopeful. He had the courage to connect slavery to black suffering today.

"Many of the disparities that exist . . . can be traced directly to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation," he said. He went on to connect the achievement gap with the legacy of inferior, racially segregated schools that still haven't been fixed "50 years after Brown versus Board of Education."

He noted that legalized discrimination had prevented blacks from owning property or getting jobs or loans to purchase homes. The result has been the inability of countless blacks to accumulate wealth and pass on the benefits to their children. Obama linked a lack of economic opportunity to crime and poverty.

Of course, some still could not handle the truth. Brit Hume of Fox News, for instance, thought Obama was "blaming whites" -- even though Obama specifically called on African Americans to take responsibility for their lives.

That was enough to make me want to wallow in the muck again. But Obama had made a point that was bigger than Hume or Buchanan or even himself. To get where you need to go, you've got to know where you came from. And even if Obama doesn't make it all the way to the White House, I sure like where he's taken me so far.

Washington Post: Obama's Road Map on Race

By Eugene Robinson Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Once again, the conventional wisdom proved stunningly unwise. Barack Obama was supposed to be on his heels, forced into a backpedaling, defensive crouch after racially charged remarks by his former pastor, delivered from the pulpit years ago, suddenly became the hottest story of the presidential campaign. But instead of running away, Obama issued a challenge to those who would exploit the issue of race: Bring it on.

Yesterday morning, in what may be remembered as a landmark speech regardless of who becomes the next president, Obama established new parameters for a dialogue on race in America that might actually lead somewhere -- that might break out of the sour stasis of grievance and countergrievance, of insensitivity and hypersensitivity, of mutual mistrust.

"My goal was to try to lift up some truth that people talk about privately but don't always talk about publicly between the races," Obama told me in a telephone interview later in the day. He delivered his speech, titled "A More Perfect Union," in Philadelphia just yards from Independence Hall.

As expected, Obama categorically denounced the incendiary sound bites from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons that have been played endlessly on cable television in recent days. Wright displayed "a profoundly distorted view of this country," Obama said in his speech, "a view that sees white racism as endemic."

But Obama didn't stop there. He went on to specify what was wrong with Wright's preaching about racism in the United States: "It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress had been made; as if this country . . . is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past."

The consensus among the commentariat was that Obama, as a matter of political tactics, should want to shift the conversation away from the subject of race as quickly as possible. He told me that the decision not to turn away, but to give a major speech on the issue, was his.

"What was fascinating over the last three or four days was to see how Reverend Wright's admittedly offensive comments . . . were packaged in sound bites in a way that didn't contribute to understanding between black and white Americans but only expanded the chasm between them," he said. "I thought it was both a challenge and an opportunity to use this moment to describe, to black and white, why there is this chasm."

And that may have been the most significant aspect of the speech: the fact that Obama proposed a conversation, not a monologue. He not only laid out the reasons some African Americans might feel alienated or resentful but also the reasons some white Americans might feel the same way.

"Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race," Obama said in the speech. "Their experience is the immigrant experience -- as far as they're concerned, no one handed them anything, they built it from scratch. . . . So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college . . . when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time."

These resentments have "helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation," Obama told his audience. "And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns -- this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding."

Obama called on African Americans to embrace "the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past," and to take "full responsibility for our own lives." And he's absolutely right.

This amounts to a new set of talking points for a discussion about race: Don't be paralyzed by history but acknowledge its effects. Recognize that whites have legitimate grievances that are not racist. Don't cling to victimhood as an all-purpose excuse. Accept personal responsibility.

Obama told me that he doesn't intend to make race a major theme of his campaign. "I don't think that we are going to be gnawing on this bone at every stop," he said. But I believe he might have pulled off something that seemed almost impossible: He not only ventured into the minefield of race and made it back alive, but he also marked a path for the rest of us to follow.

On American Hypocrisy

Obama's Minister Committed 'Treason' But When My Father Said the Same Thing He was a Republican Hero

by Frank Schaeffer | Huffington Post

When Senator Obama's preacher thundered about racism and injustice Obama suffered smear-by-association. But when my late father -- Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer -- denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr.

Every Sunday thousands of right wing white preachers (following in my father's footsteps) rail against America's sins from tens of thousands of pulpits. They tell us that America is complicit in the "murder of the unborn," has become "Sodom" by coddling gays, and that our public schools are sinful places full of evolutionists and sex educators hell-bent on corrupting children. They say, as my dad often did, that we are, "under the judgment of God." They call America evil and warn of immanent destruction. By comparison Obama's minister's shouted "controversial" comments were mild. All he said was that God should damn America for our racism and violence and that no one had ever used the N-word about Hillary Clinton.

Dad and I were amongst the founders of the Religious right. In the 1970s and 1980s, while Dad and I crisscrossed America denouncing our nation's sins instead of getting in trouble we became darlings of the Republican Party. (This was while I was my father's sidekick before I dropped out of the evangelical movement altogether.) We were rewarded for our "stand" by people such as Congressman Jack Kemp, the Fords, Reagan and the Bush family. The top Republican leadership depended on preachers and agitators like us to energize their rank and file. No one called us un-American.

Consider a few passages from my father's immensely influential America-bashing book A Christian Manifesto. It sailed under the radar of the major media who, back when it was published in 1980, were not paying particular attention to best-selling religious books. Nevertheless it sold more than a million copies.

Here's Dad writing in his chapter on civil disobedience:

If there is a legitimate reason for the use of force [against the US government]... then at a certain point force is justifiable.

And this:

In the United States the materialistic, humanistic world view is being taught exclusively in most state schools... There is an obvious parallel between this and the situation in Russia [the USSR]. And we really must not be blind to the fact that indeed in the public schools in the United States all religious influence is as forcibly forbidden as in the Soviet Union....

Then this:

There does come a time when force, even physical force, is appropriate... A true Christian in Hitler's Germany and in the occupied countries should have defied the false and counterfeit state. This brings us to a current issue that is crucial for the future of the church in the United States, the issue of abortion... It is time we consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to God's law it abrogates it's authority. And our loyalty to the God who gave this law then requires that we make the appropriate response in that situation...

Was any conservative political leader associated with Dad running for cover? Far from it. Dad was a frequent guest of the Kemps, had lunch with the Fords, stayed in the White House as their guest, he met with Reagan, helped Dr. C. Everett Koop become Surgeon General. (I went on the 700 Club several times to generate support for Koop).

Dad became a hero to the evangelical community and a leading political instigator. When Dad died in 1984 everyone from Reagan to Kemp to Billy Graham lamented his passing publicly as the loss of a great American. Not one Republican leader was ever asked to denounce my dad or distanced himself from Dad's statements.

Take Dad's words and put them in the mouth of Obama's preacher (or in the mouth of any black American preacher) and people would be accusing that preacher of treason. Yet when we of the white Religious Right denounced America white conservative Americans and top political leaders, called our words "godly" and "prophetic" and a "call to repentance."

We Republican agitators of the mid 1970s to the late 1980s were genuinely anti-American in the same spirit that later Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (both followers of my father) were anti-American when they said God had removed his blessing from America on 9/11, because America accepted gays. Falwell and Robertson recanted but we never did.

My dad's books denouncing America and comparing the USA to Hitler are still best sellers in the "respectable" evangelical community and he's still hailed as a prophet by many Republican leaders. When Mike Huckabee was recently asked by Katie Couric to name one book he'd take with him to a desert island, besides the Bible, he named Dad's Whatever Happened to the Human Race? a book where Dad also compared America to Hitler's Germany.

The hypocrisy of the right denouncing Obama, because of his minister's words, is staggering. They are the same people who argue for the right to "bear arms" as "insurance" to limit government power. They are the same people that (in the early 1980s roared and cheered when I called down damnation on America as "fallen away from God" at their national meetings where I was keynote speaker, including the annual meeting of the ultraconservative Southern Baptist convention, and the religious broadcasters that I addressed.

Today we have a marriage of convenience between the right wing fundamentalists who hate Obama, and the "progressive" Clintons who are playing the race card through their own smear machine. As Jane Smiley writes in the Huffington Post "[The Clinton's] are, indeed, now part of the 'vast right wing conspiracy.'

Both the far right Republicans and the stop-at-nothing Clintons are using the "scandal" of Obama's preacher to undermine the first black American candidate with a serious shot at the presidency. Funny thing is, the racist Clinton/Far Right smear machine proves that Obama's minister had a valid point. There is plenty to yell about these days.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of "CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back