Barack Obama – Page 35

Polling Obama

Matt Yglesias reports on a poll — via Andrew Sullivan and Jon Chait — that offers some interesting insight into where Barack Obama’s support comes from or doesn’t, as the case may be. The poll shows, or purports to show, that race and ethnicity play into the decision voters will make about Obama — and possibly about Clinton down the road.

The numbers:

The focus has been on race, but as Yglesias says, the poll can be read differently:

conservative views about race don’t seem to be nearly as big an influence on anti-Obama sentiments as are conservative views about national security — it’s the “fight for U.S. right or wrong” crowd that’s really heavily represented in the anti-Obama coalition. It’s also fascinating to see that Democrats who agree that “men make better leaders” have a net negative view of Obama; apparently that kind of retrograde cultural conservatism sufficiently correlates with anti-Obama sentiments that even running against a woman doesn’t turn those people into Obama fans.

This could be viewed as being bad news for the Democrats, regardless of who gets the nomination, because the chief alternative to Obama is a woman. But, I want to point out that these are probably the kind of voters who self-identify as Democrats but who were not likely to vote Democrat in November.

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There’s reality and then there’s cable news

Response to the Obama speech on race and the entire Wright affair appears more nuanced and varied than the TV shows are portaying — at least according to this CBS News poll.

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Son of a preacher….

Call it a preacher pattern, but it seems that the preachers to the presidential candidates are not exactly the shy and retiring types.

All of the attention this week was on Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright, but Obama is not the only presidential candidate whose spiritual guide has made some controversial comments. Well, not controversial, so much as…well….

Let’s just say that JohnMcCain’s spiritual guide — that’s what the Arizona senator calls him — has made some rough statements, comments that are far worse than anything the Rev. Wright thundered during one of his vitriolic moments.

Reverend Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church of Columbus, Ohio — whom Sen. John McCain hails as a spiritual adviser — has suggested on several occasions that the U.S. government was complicit in facilitating black genocide.

In speeches that have gone largely unnoticed, Parsley (who is white) compares Planned Parenthood, the reproductive care and family planning group, to the Klu Klux Klan and Nazis, and describes the American government as enablers of murder for supporting the organization.

“If I were call for the sterilization or the elimination of an entire segment of society, I’d be labeled a racists or a murderer, or at very best a Nazi,” says Parsley. “That every single year, millions of our tax dollars are funding a national organization built upon that very goal — their target: African Americans. That’s right, the death toll: nearly fifteen hundred African Americans a day. The shocking truth of black genocide.”

He goes on.

“Right now our own government is allowing organizations like Planned Parenthood to legally take the innocent lives of precious baby girls and baby boys and even footing the bill for it all with our tax dollars, turning every single one of us into accessories to murder,” he says. “You know who their biggest fans must be, that must be the Klu Klux Klan, because the woman who founded this organization detested black people…. African Americans were number one on Margaret Sanger’s list. So this ‘Lady MacDeath,’ as I like to call her, studied the works of Englishman Thomas Robert Malthus, and embraced his plan of eugenics.”

But because these comments were not directed at American foreign and domestic policy, because Rod Parsley’s comments stem from the fringe of the conservative movement, they are allowed to fly under the radar.

Even the comments reported last week in Mother Jones, calling the United States a Christian nation founded to destroy the false religion of Islam, failed to raise much of a storm or even much of a breeze.

Wright’s sermons, on the other hand, spread like viruses around the Web, run repeatedly on cable television and force the candidate to make the campaign’s most impressive speech. An even-handed approach to the campaign would have resulted in both preachers being vetted extensively, their comments explored and placed in context and the candidates they are associated with answering questions.

Obama, though his speech, has answered at least some of them. McCain, however, must be made to answer his own — and to rebuke his own spiritual guide for the ugly comments he has made over the years about Planned Parenthood, gays and others.

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The Wright question

E.J. Dionne Jr. asks an important question — the right question, as far as I’m concerned — about the Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright: “Is he as far outside the African American mainstream as many of us would like to think?”

The answer, as Obama said on Tuesday, is no. And we ignore this reality at the nation’s peril because we can not find unity and move forward without acknowledging this.

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Surprising comments on Obama

I’ve pointed out that there were conservatives who reacted positively to Barack Obama’s speech, but James Fallows finds a reaction that runs significantly deeper — and is more impressive — than the positive critical responses to Obama: Mike Huckabee, who “dared speak as a human being rather than as an on-message apparatchik” about the Wright affair on Joe Scarborough’s show.

And one other thing I think we’ve gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say “That’s a terrible statement!”…I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told “you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus…”

And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

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