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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ann Corrigan who wrote (23688)	3/20/2008 4:52:09 PM
From: TideGlider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224749

Obama's `Cheap' Words May Prove Costly to Him: Margaret Carlson Commentary by Margaret Carlson March 20 (Bloomberg) -- ``Words are cheap,'' Senator Hillary Clinton said when she first realized that Senator Barack Obama's were anything but. Self-aware enough to know she couldn't beat him on a podium, she decided to turn him into a latter day Elmer Gantry fooling people with sweet talk. Obama's words this week may be the costliest any presidential candidate has ever uttered. In my time covering politics, I've never heard a candidate speak so honestly. It was shockingly candid, written in the middle of a breakneck campaign and delivered amid great turmoil, a trick not unlike trying to comb your hair in a wind tunnel. He may have felt he had no choice. The storm over the inflammatory words of his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, lashing out against whites was threatening his historic candidacy. Obama did have a choice about whether to just deal with the controversy or to plunge into the tenderest -- and most combustible -- subject in America, race. He chose the latter. The last time a candidate had to confront an episode as perilous as this was Bill Clinton in 1992 after Gennifer Flowers came forward and said she'd had a relationship with him. The Clintons' response in a ``60 Minutes'' TV interview was billed as a totally candid exchange on the most delicate of matters. It fell far short of that. Flowers was hardly an aberration. And Hillary, who denied any intent to stand by her man, suffering like Tammy Wynette, did just that. Still, the limited hangout worked well enough to propel Clinton through a dangerous moment in his candidacy. Brutally Honest The jury is very much out, but Obama's dramatic effort on March 18 may prove to be the opposite -- searing honesty about a complex, emotional subject which turns out to be, for the candidate, no help at all. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson, it may be that America can't handle the truth and that, for political expediency, Obama should have made like a Clinton: Deliver a clean, sound-bite- ready break from Wright that Reagan Democrats in Pennsylvania could have batted around at the Knights of Columbus hall. Instead, he renounced the sin but not the sinner, recognizing that each race has grievances the other has trouble acknowledging. It was an almost hour-long speech that required voters to sit still, open their minds, and listen for nuance, a challenge during a bare-knuckles campaign. It's why nuance is so rarely attempted. While every editorial I saw praised the speech, I didn't hear many Republicans doing so. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called it ``intellectually, fundamentally dishonest.'' Republicans for Obama Some Republicans are switching from hoping that Clinton, with her high negatives, will win the nomination to rooting for Obama with the possibility of even higher negatives if the Wright videos with their porn-flick graininess and hysterical tone continue to dominate the conversation. Republican strategist Alex Castellanos says his party is, for the first time, ``rethinking Hillary as their favorite candidate.'' One Republican particularly unmoved by Obama's speech was Representative Peter King of New York who said his party had ``to make Reverend Wright a centerpiece of the campaign.'' This is the same King who pointedly overlooked the murderous tactics of the Irish Republican Army and its association with Hezbollah as he vigorously justified their cause in the 1980s and 90s. `Eat This Up' One consultant, Rick Wilson, who made the 2002 ad linking former Democratic Senator Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden, told politico.com the Republicans should ``eat this up like cake.'' We'll see if Rush Limbaugh switches his fervid hope for a Clinton candidacy to Obama, as he pleads with dittoheads to cross over and vote for a Democrat in open primaries to ensure the weakest one gets the nomination. If Obama gave the speech at any other time, it would be a welcome opportunity to speak about what remains largely unspeakable. When he said he cringed when his white grandmother who loved him more than anyone in the world made hurtful remarks about blacks, I cringed at the memory of remarks made within my own family. That was a generation ago. Now, I live next door to an all- black church. Every Sunday a prosperous-looking group chats on the sidewalk outside, and then goes inside and shouts ``Amen'' to invocations of their struggles against injustice. Owning Up I asked a churchgoer about Wright's crackpot notion that the government had inflicted AIDS upon the black community. She scoffed but asked me to remember an accusation that once seemed equally farfetched: that the government had secretly withheld treatment for syphilis, while pretending to provide it, from 399 black men from 1932 to 1972 to further medical research. The government didn't own up to the Tuskegee Experiment until forced to after it was exposed in 1975. There Obama stood in the City of Brotherly Love, an imperfect man giving a nearly perfect speech on the toughest of topics. What he hoped to transcend now, for the moment at least, defines him. If it ultimately doesn't help him become president, he should take consolation that it helped his country. (Margaret Carlson, author of ``Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House'' and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.) To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net Last Updated: March 20, 2008 00:01 EDT