Obama's Relationships Tell You Something About the Man

Related post: The Candidates and the Preachers, Obama responds and Rev. Wright quits the campaign.

While Obama levitates gently above the rest of us, calling us together in peace and love, his relationships tell us something that the campaign doesn't about the real Obama. Here are a couple of items from The Corner:

(From John Derbyshire): It's nice that Jeremiah Wright, Senator Obama's pastor for twenty years, has been getting some air time. People still seem reluctant to acknowledge, though, the thing I said yesterday: that Wright's views are not extraordinary or "unorthodox" among black Americans. In that milieu, they are pretty mainstream, and Senator Obama must be scratching his head and wondering what the fuss is about.

For example, Bill O'Reilly was hyperventilating on the telly last night about Wright's having said, in a sermon, that HIV is a man-made virus, deliberately spread by the U.S. government in a plot to exterminate black people. In fact, a lot of black Americans believe this. Here is a 2005 poll showing that:

Almost half of all African-Americans believe that HIV, the virus that causes Aids, is man-made, more than a quarter believe it was produced in a government laboratory and one in eight think it was created and spread by the CIA, according to a study released by Rand Corporation and the University of Oregon.

I have no doubt that non-black Americans would be willing to vote for a black American as president. Not many of us, however, would be willing to vote for a candidate who thought of himself as black first and American second. That such people exist is proved by the success of Jeremiah Wright — and by the applause of his congregation.

Is Barack Obama such a person? If he is not, why has he been such a loyal member of that congregation, making five-figure donations to Wright's church at least as late as 2006? Calling on Wright to bless his marriage and his house, and baptize his children? Using a passage from one of Wright's sermons as the title of his second book?

On the campaign trail, Obama has certainly not come across as a white-hating, America-hating black radical. A man can be known, though, by the company he keeps. Obama has been keeping some mighty weird company.

Does the Senator believe, as his revered pastor does (and as that pastor's congregation apparently does too) that HIV was made in a government lab? Perhaps someone should ask him. Perhaps someone should have been asking this stuff six months ago.

And a reply from Mona Charen:

Derb: I am coming to believe that Barack Obama is one of the greatest con artists we've seen. His entire campaign has been about "coming together," a post-racial consensus, etc. Any mention of his middle name was immediately condemned as ignorant fear-mongering. He has played the role of racial unifier with great skill and finesse.

But there is a great deal of evidence out there that he is anything but. The Reverend Wright is exhibit A. Mrs. Obama is Exhibit B. But there's lots more. Here is a piece by John Batchelor about some of Obama's other connections. For example:

William Ayers is the second Chicago figure to consider in the political profile of Mr. Obama. William C. Ayers, known as Bill Ayers, is notorious as a terrorist bomber from the 1970s who, on September 11, 2001, in the New York Times was quoted as finding "a certain eloquence in bombs." Now, at 62, Mr. Ayers, a former aide to the current Mayor Richard M. Daley, is an established professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Importantly, Mr. Ayers and his wife, the equally notorious Weatherman terrorist Bernardine Dohrn, hosted a crucial meet-the-candidate event in their Hyde Park neighborhood home in 1995 when Mr. Obama, also a Hyde Park resident, was sounded out by vital citizens, among them the retiring state senator Alice Palmer for the 13th District.

Obama's book is strewn with hints of his far left sympathies, as when he tells an African cousin who complains about the hardships of life in Kenya that things are no better in America. Or when he suggests that the lives of poor black young men in the inner city are blighted by white racism. He never says it explicitly, but it's there.

He has been very friendly with Rashid Khaladi, the fierce anti-Israel professor who took Edward Said's post at Columbia.

My own theory, FWIW, is that Obama acquired his far left views at least in part to make himself as authentically black as he could to compensate for having a white mother. His mother, of course, was very left herself. But looking the way he does, and having been raised among only white people (mother and maternal grandparents) he felt the need to better identify with his black heritage. That struggle is what the book is all about.

One can have sympathy for his psychological predicament . But that sympathy certainly does not extend to electing him president of a country that I sincerely believe he does not love.

These revelations about Obama's pastor and some of his other relationships are coming at a bad time for him since there's six weeks until the next primary. With the press undistracted by other contests and various Obama victory laps, they'll have some time to devote to these important issues...if they choose. You can be sure the Clinton campaign will be doing what they can to get this information out.