March 20, 2008
The Speech
Did Obama give us a dream or a nightmare?
by Victor Davis Hanson
Private Papers

These exerts were taken from previous postings on NRO’s The Corner.

Obama the Magician

I think the speech has wowed Obama’s base, yet after its mesmerizing delivery wears off, it will perhaps raise more questions with most others.

The Obama narratives suggest a disturbing lack of responsibility, or of any notion of free will. Michelle, for example, apparently had no free will in taking out big loans to go to Harvard Law School, only pique that they must be paid back.

Barack had likewise no free will in allying himself as friend, parishioner, and confidant with an abject racist who is now evolved into a “former” pastor, and a “scholar” and “an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy” and “controversial” (apparently “not particularly controversial” is now inoperative).

Indeed, the last thing Obama wants, in fact, is an honest, painful discussion about race in America, especially how centuries of racism, but also as well as present demagogic leadership, white guilt, and ineffective and counterproductive government programs, have all factored into present endemic problems of illegitimacy, extraordinary high crime rates, and often racist narratives from the likes of Wright and Farrakhan to rap music — and yet have not precluded the amazing success and parity with the rest of America on the part of well over half of the African-American community.

Two corollaries always follow the Obama victimology: moral equivalence and the subtle suggestion that any who question his thesis of despair are themselves suspect.

So we hear of poor Barack’s grandmother’s private fears in the same breath as Wright’s public hatred. Geraldine Ferraro is understood in the same context as Reverend Wright. The Reagan Coalition and talk radio are identical to Reverend Wright — albeit without similar contexts for their own purported racism. Your own pastor, priest, or rabbi are analogous to Rev. Wright.

And then, of course, your own motives are suspect if you question any of this sophistry. For Michelle it is always “they” who raised new obstacles against this deprived Ivy League couple and their quest for the Presidency; for Barack it is those who play “snippets”, or the system of “corporate culture” that has made Wright the object of anger to similarly victimized poor white pawns.

The message? Wright’s motives for espousing hatred are complex and misunderstood; your motives for worrying about Obama and his Pastor are simple and suspect.

When Obama the magician was all done this morning, Obama was no longer under examination for terrible judgment in subsidizing a racist by his association and purse, nor was even the racist Wright under doubt; instead almost everyone else, from the system to his grandmother, to talk radio, to corporate culture, to your rabbi or priest suddenly was.

The result? This will apparently play well with a Democratic African-American audience and white elite liberals, who are already giddy and comparing the speech to Martin Luther King’s best. In this way of thinking, after all, that for the last seven years the most powerful diplomats in the world have been two African-Americans counts little (Wright, for example, slurred Sec. Rice), but that anyone would dare ask a presidential candidate to dissociate himself from a racist counts a lot.

Yet in the general election, millions will still remember how Obama’s pastor and confidant Reverend Wright cursed their culture and their country, and they will still remain confused about his relationship with and influence upon their would-be next President — and in the end they will be very much angered by all that indeed.

Imagine "The Obama Defense"

I predict Obama has bequeathed to us a new lexicon, a novel way to explain away racist outbursts.

Obama has sanctified the doctrines of moral equivalence (the private racial slight is balanced by the televised public hatred; everyone has a pastor in some ways like Wright, etc.) and contextualization (you must understand Wright's context and background; the good that he does; the protocols of the black church, etc.). The result is a lowering of the bar for the next racial outburst, since the perpetrator will immediately resort to the Obama defenses. And since we now know that Obama heard some of these "controversial" Wright sermons and did not object, we can see that his earlier, once just condemnation of someone like Imus — like many of his initial defenses of Wright — may now be inoperative:

"I understand MSNBC has suspended Mr. Imus. But I would also say that there's nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group. And I would hope that NBC ends up having that same attitude. ... He didn't just cross the line. He fed into some of the worst stereotypes that my two young daughters are having to deal with today in America. The notions that as young African-American women — who I hope will be athletes — that that somehow makes them less beautiful or less important. It was a degrading comment. It's one that I'm not interested in supporting." (October 2007)

The new sophistic Obama, however, would recount to us all the charity work and good that Imus had once done and still does, that we don't understand the joshing of the shock-jock radio genre that winks and nods at controversy in theatrical ways, that Imus was a legend and pioneer among talk show hosts, that Obama's own black relatives have on occasions expressed prejudicial statements about whites similar to what Imus does, that we all have our favorite talk shows, whose hosts occasionally cross the line, and that he can't quite remember whether he'd ever been on the Imus show, or whether he ever had heard Imus say anything that was insensitive — and therefore he could not and would not disown a Don Imus.

This is the real message of the Obama racial transcendence candidacy.

The Tragedy of Obama's Speech

The tragedy of Obama's speech and the mindless endorsement of it was the rejection of any constant moral standard — an absolute sense of wrong and right that transcends situational ethics, context, and individual particulars. And once one jettisons such absolutes, they won't be there when one wishes to seek refuge in them in a future hour of need.

When he failed to "disown" Rev. Wright, and then brought in parallels of things purportedly as bad, or offered excuses that Wright had done good things to balance the bad, or that there were certain mitigating circumstances that explain his hatred, then the universal wrong of Wright's racism and lying disappears and with it any ethical standard by which we have moral authority to condemn such vitriol.

That this self-serving relativism was used to address a self-induced political disaster is especially unfortunate for a self-appointed moralist. I think the liberal blanket endorsement of the Obama speech will later come back to haunt its enthusiasts, once they see the creepy freak show that emerges from the woodwork, immune in public discourse now from absolute standards of rebuke.

In that regard, the grandmother metaphor, the radio talk show simile, the evocation of Ferraro, the context of the black church, etc. were meaningless without any unequivocal rejection of Rev. Wright and what he stands for.

This was a transformational speech — but in ways its endorsers can hardly believe but will surely regret. The voters of Pennsylvania will be the first indication of Obama's folly, followed by the moral paralysis that meets the next outbreak of racism and hatred in the public forum.