Obama, Reverend Wright, and Ethical Campaigning.

By Jim Fryar.

Note; In the cartoon which was drawn prior to the clinging to guns statement Obama seems to have his nose in the air. The snob thing really is obvious.

John McCain is very strongly against the advertisement run by the North Carolina GOP using the Reverend Wrights God damn America sermon. I feel that this is shortsighted as it allows Obama to run the agenda in the same way as Kevin Rudd ran it over here in the last federal election.

I don’t see how a legitimate criticism of a candidates weaknesses is negative as Obama insists. I really think that John is being too much of a gentleman for his own good. I have a great deal of respect for him and his principles are one of the reasons for this. When it comes to attacking Obama over his association with Wright, I have no problems. It is not going into private areas that are none of our business.

This is the advertisement.


The association with Wright is something that defines the candidate; indeed he has himself described Wright as some sort of father figure. This man has had a dramatic effect on the attitudes of Obama himself.

I can understand the desire of John McCain for a positive campaign however to ignore the weaknesses of the opposition in the face of an unethical campaign by his opponents is political suicide. Unethical campaigning by opponents includes the recent articles in the Washington Post and NYT, both of which were done as mouthpieces for the Democrats.

The deliberate misrepresentation of McCains position on Iraq is classical of this phenomena.

The claims by Obama that he was not present at those sermons that have been highlighted just doesn’t cut it. Unless he is such a snob that he does not relate to the other parishioners, he would have been told of such highlights by others.

The Rev. Wright thing is big because of the extensive audiovisual proof of what was said. On elitism: Barack Obama went to the preeminent prep school in Hawaii. He went to Columbia and Harvard Law School.

There are some good people who graduated from those schools (Judge Roberts on the Supreme Court for example) but they seem to fill most graduates with a sense that they're superior to everybody else. This is another defining aspect to the character of the candidate, explaining his contempt for small town America.

Clinging to guns and religion, hostile to outsiders, that is not the impression of the Americans I have met, and they don’t all come from big cities.

The character of Obama and his associations are a legitimate part of the campaign. They should be highlighted so that come November Obama is left with only his natural constituency, the fat cat liberals, the elitists, the obsequious, and those college kids who have not yet learned to understand the concept of 'empty rhetoric.'

Obama had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the podium just to get some sort of retraction of his support of Wright in relation to the "God damn America" and "Chickens coming home to roost" statements. These are however only the more obvious statements taken in by Obama.

Wright works at a much more insidious level as well as can be seen in the following statements from 'The Audacity of Hope' sermon which has had a profound effect on Obama. The first is: -

Abraham Lincoln is remembered as the “Great Emancipator” of the slaves, but in reality, he did not see black Africans as equal with whites. (The issue of slavery was paramount for him because it threatened the unity of the country. The primary reason that the Civil War was fought was not to free the slaves, but to save the United States...

While I am not in a position to judge whether Lincoln believed in actual equality, this is a blindly bigoted statement. Ask yourself " What was Lincoln trying to save the US from?" Wright conveniently ignores the fact that the issue dividing America at the time was slavery. This is basically a claim that whitey is not capable of using a sense of decency and that only an ulterior motive will inspire him.

The next one is about MLK: -

.....he was iced and isolated by all the establishment blacks. And in order for him to hang in and hold on, in order for him to have the audacity to hope, he had to have a vertical hookup that assimilated Negroes had forgotten all about.

Note the attempt to create a divide, not just between black and white, but to isolate those of his own race who are not 'his', those who have risen above race and worked as Americans to make a life for themselves.

These people are the ones that he has no appeal for, those who reject Wrights appeal to victim hood, those who stand up for themselves and are standing with white America on equal terms. This sort of logic if it can be called that is the sort of thing that serves to divide and separate people.

Those who have successfully integrated and made good should be an example to inspire others. It can be done, but the people who do are not the sort of audience the reverend Wright has, so they have to be isolated as some sort of cultural traitors.

To him and his acolytes they are therefore, "establishment blacks" or "assimilated Negroes".

I say yes, publish this stuff, Wright is as relevant to the campaign as Obama is.