March 20, 2008
“Throw Grandma Under the Bus”: The Philadelphia Speech and Barack Obama’s Crass Politics
Here’s the comment that, in the end, will have proved to have done more damage to Barack Obama’s presidential aspirations than anything Rev. Jeremiah Wright ever said. From his famed Monday speech in Philadelphia:
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, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
As Christopher Hitchens put it yesterday when interviewed by Hugh Hewitt: the old joke about politicians is that they would sell their own grandmothers to get what they want - and that’s exactly what Obama did - I’ve never seen that actually done before!
As usual, Ann Coulter hits it right on the head (well worth a full read):
Wright is not a relative of Obama’s at all. Yet Obama cravenly compared Wright’s racist invective to his actual grandmother, who “once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
Rev. Wright accuses white people of inventing AIDS to kill black men, but Obama’s grandmother — who raised him, cooked his food, tucked him in at night, and paid for his clothes and books and private school — has expressed the same feelings about passing black men on the street that Jesse Jackson has.
Perhaps Obama can get away with dismissing Wright as a “crazy uncle”, and falsely claiming critics are making him “guilty by association”. But he will not, in the eyes of the average American voter, get away with placing his own grandmother on the same moral plain as Rev. Jeremiah Wright. (And here’s betting Obama’s grandmother has the class to never, ever condemn her grandson in public).
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