Part of my frustration with Sarah Palin is represented by the following excerpt from an October 23 interview NBC-TV news anchor Brian Williams with both McCain and Palin:
WILLIAMS: Are we changing--it's been said that to gives it a vaguely post-9/11 hint, using that word that we don't normally associate with domestic crimes. Are we changing the definition? Are the people who set fire to American cities during the '60s terrorists in--under this definition? Is an abortion clinic bomber a terrorist under this definition, Governor?Gov. PALIN: There's no question that Bill Ayers, via his own admittance, was one who sought to destroy our US capital and our Pentagon. That is a domestic terrorist. There's no question there. Now, others who would want to engage in harming innocent Americans or facilities that it would be unacceptable to--I don't know if you're going to use the word terrorist there, but it's unacceptable, and it would not be condoned, of course, on our watch. But I don't know--if what you're asking is if I regret referring to Bill Ayers as an unrepentant domestic terrorist, I don't regret characterizing him as that.WILLIAMS: No, I'm just asking what other categories you would put in there, abortion clinic bombers, protesters in cities where fires were started, Molotov cocktails were thrown, people died?Gov. PALIN: I would put in that category of Bill Ayers anyone else who would seek to campaign, to destroy our United States capital and our Pentagon and would seek to destroy innocent Americans.
There are a few things going on here. First, Brian Williams is intentionally trying to link the McCain/Palin pro-life position with abortion clinic bombers, which is an implicit attempt to suggest that Obama is no worse for having an Ayers link with domestic terrorism. Neither Palin nor McCain seem to pick up on Williams' partisan smear; it is true that pro-life people are morally repulsed by facilities that exist for the purpose of killing innocent unborn babies, but almost all subscribe to principles and methods consistent with Martin Luther King's philosophy of nonviolent resistance. One might wonder if Williams in the 1960's would have tried to link King to race riots over the issue of racial justice.
Second, Brian Williams is posing a gotcha question, trying to get Palin to define a terrorist. Palin is implicitly admitting a variation of Justice Porter Stewart's dictum regarding pornography: "I can't define it but I know what it is when I see it." In my opinion, Palin has an irritating habit of rambling, over-explanatory, repetitive sound bite responses. Let me say here, I would have answered the question directly, which, once again, Sarah Palin doesn't do, but I would have used it as a segue to discussing Barack Obama's conceptual ambiguity between criminal and terrorist activity and relevant individual rights and Obama's political opportunism in terms of FISA legislation.
I would have responded that we characterize terrorist threats or actions as premeditated and violent in nature, linked to some political cause or purpose and intended for a specific effect, such as fear or concessions (e.g., US withdrawal from the Middle East). Riots are often sparked by external events, unfocused and temporal. Animal rights terrorists may fire-bomb science lab facilities. Ecoterrorists have been known to booby trap forest harvesting activities. And, yes, radicalized abortion opponents may blow up clinics or target abortionists with the intent of stopping abortions. In our democratic republic, we need to enact change through our political system, not act outside the law, and related criminal acts should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Third, Palin is not making the correct point about Ayers and Obama's other dubious links (e.g., Jeremiah Wright, Fr. Pfleger, and Tony Rezko). Obama is disingenuously misrepresenting himself and low-keying politically inconvenient relationships, just as he has knowingly lied and changed his story several times with regards to his involvement with the Born Alive Infant Protection Act in Illinois (I've critiqued his position in past posts following the third debate).
What Palin should have stressed is that the question of Obama's relationships is not a Republican invention but were first addressed by the Chicago media and in fact during the Democratic primaries. There are highly salient points for voters.
First, a President makes a number of appointments. What kind of judgment has he exhibited in his personal or professional life in terms of the people he's worked with? If you were an aspiring politician, the last thing you would want to do is associate with the wrong type of people.
Second, we expect that one would tend to associate with people with whom you share common values. For example, Obama claims to have known Rev. Jeremiah Wright for 20 years; Obama preaches a racial and post-partisan philosophy clearly at odds with Wright's anti-Americanism and racially divisive rhetoric. Yet Wright married Barack and Michelle, baptized their daughters, etc. Obama claimed he could no more renounce Rev. Wright than his own maternal grandmother whom raised him; yet just as soon as Wright suggested that Obama was acting like any other politician, saying whatever it took to get elected, Obama threw him under the bus and eventually resigned from the church in question.
The whole issue of Rev. Jeremiah Wright yielded interesting but troubling insights to Obama's judgment; Obama stood behind Wright, even after the "God damn America" clip was constantly replayed. What he could and should have said from day one is, "I was not aware of Rev. Wright's sermon. This is fundamentally at odds with my views and values, and my family is no longer affiliated with Trinity United Church of Christ." What does Obama's constant refusal to deal with Wright, long after it was obvious to everyone that he was a liability, say about Obama's character? Some (including myself) would say that he was unwilling to admit he was wrong about Wright, that he believed that people were taking a sound bite out of context. Others would argue Obama's admirable loyalty to a friend of some 20 years, but then the way Obama threw Wright under the bus the day after Wright publicly criticized him makes it clear that Obama did not reject Wright for saying "God damn America" but because of the public criticism of Obama, which suggests that Obama is extremely thin-skinned. Note to Obama: If you think Wright's saying you are acting just like any other politician is an unpardonable sin, you haven't spent a day in George Bush's shoes.
Third, we learn a lot of a politician's character by how he handles controversies. Does he respond, in the distinctive mode of John McCain's directness, his legendary "Straight Talk", for example, taking full responsibility for the failure of his first marriage, not using his Vietnam experience serve as an excuse? Does he get it out or simply react as new facts surface and shift his story?
Obama's Connections to Ayers and Wright
In the case of Ayers, we're supposed to believe that Barack Obama, a trained lawyer, does not know of the man whom, ironically, is quoted on 9/11 in a New York Times column by Dinitia Smith:
''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.''...He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings...Now he has written a book, ''Fugitive Days'' (Beacon Press)...He writes that he participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972...So, would Mr. Ayers do it all again, he is asked? ''I don't want to discount the possibility,'' he said.But now let us consider Obama’s short review of Bill Ayers' A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court (Beacon Press, 1997) from the Chicago Tribune (12/21/97) regarding current books Chicago notables were reading: “A searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair.”
In the 11/6/97 issue of the The University of Chicago Chronicle, Jennifer Vanasco writes, "Ayers, who spent a year observing the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center in Chicago, ...one of four panelists who will speak on juvenile justice at 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20...will be joined by Sen. Barack Obama, Senior Lecturer in the Law School, who is working to combat legislation that would put more juvenile offenders into the adult system."
We really see an integration among Obama, Ayers, Wright, and ACORN. In the 12/8/95 Chicago Reader article "What Makes Obama Run?", Hank De Zutter notes Barack Obama's frustration with the piecemeal community services, food pantries and the like from the black churches and talks the language of collective economic power and a political agenda. Here are the words of The Post-Partisan One:
"The right wing, the Christian right, has done a good job of building these organizations of accountability, much better than the left or progressive forces have. But it's always easier to organize around intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and false nostalgia. And they also have hijacked the higher moral ground with this language of family values and moral responsibility....We must deal with the forces that are depressing wages, lopping off people's benefits right and left, and creating an earnings gap between CEOs and the lowest-paid worker that has risen in the last 20 years from a ratio of 10 to 1 to one of better than 100 to 1....These are mean, cruel times, exemplified by a 'lock 'em up, take no prisoners' mentality that dominates the Republican-led Congress."
Consider the Bill Ayers/Bernardine Dohrn book Race Course Against White Supremacy, conveniently scheduled for release after the election; the following product description is from amazon.com:
"White supremacy and its troubling endurance in American life is debated in these personal essays by two veteran political activists. Arguing that white supremacy has been the dominant political system in the United States since its earliest days—and that it is still very much with us—the discussion points to unexamined bigotry in the criminal justice system, election processes, war policy, and education. The book draws upon the authors' own confrontations with authorities during the Vietnam era, reasserts their belief that racism and war are interwoven issues, and offers personal stories about their lives today as parents, teachers, and reformers."Now what about the nearly $150M Barack Obama helped disburse for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge? Stanley Kurtz from National Review Online has done a good job piecing together some of these connections in a post called "Wright 101":
Jeremiah Wright turned toward African-centered thinking in the late 1980s and early 1990s (the period when, attracted by Wright’s African themes, Barack Obama first became a church member)...The fact that Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Wright’s anti-Americanism means that this is now a matter of public policy, and therefore an entirely legitimate issue in this campaign...we have evidence that in 1995, the same year Obama assumed control of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, he publicly rejected “the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation”... Obama and his very small and divided board kept the money flowing to ideologically extremist groups like the South Shore African Village Collaborative, instead of organizations focused on traditional educational achievement....The Chicago Annenberg Challenge’s own evaluators acknowledged that Annenberg-aided schools showed no improvement in achievement scores. Evaluators attributed that failure, in part, to the fact that many of Annenberg’s “external partners” had little educational expertise.What was the SSAVC?
In the winter of 1996, the Coalition for Improved Education in [Chicago’s] South Shore (CIESS) announced that it had received a $200,000 grant from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. That made CIESS an “external partner,” i.e. a community organization linked to a network of schools within the Chicago public system. This network, named the “South Shore African Village Collaborative” was thoroughly “Afrocentric” in orientation.In [a 1992 article in the] Journal of Negro Education, Nsenga Warfield-Coppock... bemoans the fact that public education in the United States is shaped by “capitalism, competitiveness, racism, sexism and oppression.” According to Warfield-Coppock, these American values “have confused African American people and oriented them toward American definitions of achievement and success and away from traditional African values...The answer...is to provide African American youth with the cultural information and values they would need to counter the potentially detrimental effects of a Eurocentrically oriented society." Relevant programs serve “a social and cultural ‘inoculation’ process that facilitates healthy, African-centered development among African American youth and protects them against the ravages of a racist, sexist, capitalist, and oppressive society.”
Kurtz identifies a number of key Afrocentric leaders whom not only conducted teacher training lectures on related topics but had connections to Wright's Trinity Church as well.
On the earlier cited reference to the small but divided board, there is reference to a member whom remarked on the almost amateurish grant proposals submitted, unprecedented in decades of reviewing grants. The fact that Obama, leading a small group, couldn't reconcile differences by rejecting proposals not meeting professional standards, doesn't bode well for someone overseeing trillions of dollars in the US economy, never mind dealing with a Congress with its own priorities.
Reprising Analysis of Obama's Associates
Sarah Palin does get across the point Ayers is an unrepentant terrorist; this is a correct response to Barack Obama's lip service to dismissing something Ayers was involved with that occurred in the early 1970's. It's fairly clear there were multiple verified occasions of Ayers and Obama meeting (juvenile criminal defense, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Ayers doing fundraisers for Obama, etc.) I do not believe for a second that Obama never knew about Bill Ayers' past given all their joint interests; first of all, Bill Ayers is quite open about his radical past, writing a memoir and several other books and posting to a blog. The idea that Barack Obama found a book written by Ayers praiseworthy but expressed no interest in Ayers' other writings or personal background seems dubious.
At the same time, I do not doubt that Obama rejects the use of violence; he has repeatedly talked about the emotional rhetoric in black churches dissipating, of existing community services, food pantries, etc., as barely scratching the surface and not transformative of the urban status quo. He thinks it's because of the reliance on individual vs. collectivist initiative. That's why we hear Obama's somewhat misleading rhetoric about coming together; he's not really talking about national consensus. He's already make it clear what he thinks of Republicans; he thinks he speaks for the "have not's" whom are numerous comparable to the select few whom have higher incomes and wealth. He sees everything as a zero-sum game. That's why he talks about "spreading the wealth around". It's why he's so confused about bitter Pennsylvanians clinging to their Bibles and their guns and voting against their self-interest--after all, didn't he co-opt them by agreeing to the same tax brackets for lower/middle-income Americans?
That being said, I think that Palin misses a key point on Ayers and Obama: Obama has been paying lip service to need for improved math and science, charter schools and merit pay: but what you see in the CAC shows money being spent on external groups and teacher training on cultural ideology. Barack Obama has already admitted he wasn't that effective as a community organizer; we also know he wasn't a very good philanthropist, receiving no benefit in achievement scores despite the disbursement of millions--never mind major goals like increased graduation rates.
Rev. Jeremiah Wright's influence on Barack Obama is beyond question. The title of Obama's best-selling second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, comes from Wright's sermons; the ubiquitous Obama mantra "Yes We Can" also was due to Wright. What we know is prominent talk show host and early Obama supporter Oprah Winfrey initially joined Trinity Church in 1984 and abruptly left the church several years ago , with no stomach for Wright's inflammatory rhetoric, finding herself personally attacked by Wright for doing so. Obama disinvited Wright from giving the invocation to the announcement of his candidacy, pointing out some of Wright's strident remarks had been summarized in a recent Rolling Stone article, and saying, "Your sermons can get a little rough." Yet Obama claimed that the infamous 2003 "God Damn America" sermon "shocked" him, that he had never seen or heard Wright use such language, either in church or in private; at the same time, he indicated on a Hannity & Colmes he would have left the church if Wright "repeatedly" had used similar rhetoric while Obama was in attendance. At the same time, Obama voiced no objection for a Trinity lifetime tribute to Farrakhan; in fact, he attended the 1995 Million Man March "as an observer" and acknowledged Farrakhan's culturally-insensitive statements were not useful in terms of Obama's goal of community building through collective activism. It appears, by inference, that Obama sees such racist rhetoric as simply an innocuous release valve in response to social and racial injustice.
The problem for Obama is that he wants and needs the support of black churches and its leaders for his community building vision, but at the same time he realizes that Afrocentric rhetoric is polarizing and unacceptable to even liberal white Democrats. He's been trying to play it both ways, and his tactics to the mainstream media is to soft-pedal or distance himself or deny connection to or knowledge of inflammatory remarks. But this is the logical equivalent of Obama voting "present" in the middle of a Presidential campaign. And it's simply not credible. I mean, at what point is he doing in his church life what he's doing in his political life and challenging Wright, Farrakhan and others to move past polarizing speech; after all, did he want his own daughters to imitate Rev. Jeremiah Wright's behavior? Does he feel comfortable exposing his own children to this behavior? Aren't pastors supposed to serve as role models for our youth? If he agreed some of Jeremiah Wright's statements are things he himself would not say, why did he remain in the parish? Does his children's upbringing take precedence over Rev. Jeremiah Wright's political usefulness?
Barack Obama was well aware of Rev. Jeremiah Wright (and Fr. Pfleger's) views. It's hard to believe that Obama was not aware of Wright's 2003 "God Damn America" sermon, even if he claimed that he did not attend coincidentally on the Sunday's with angry rhetoric. After all, did Oprah Winfrey decide to stop going to Trinity because Wright simply woke up cranky one Sunday? The church publishes a magazine, and Rev. Wright's sermons are available by DVD or in print. It's simply not plausible to believe the post-9/11 sermon or the "God Damn America" sermon were outliers.
Now Barack Obama is free to choose the church he wants. That's not an issue for me. The issue for me is the fact that he is intentionally misleading people about the facts, instead of straight talk. As an American voter, I have a right to know where he stands--not simply his own window-dressing of the past and a hidden agenda. Common sense suggests that Barack Obama is not fully disclosing the nature of what he knows about Wright's divisive comments, the reason being he doesn't want to address the point of why he tolerated them for 20 years, while he had an immediate reaction to an ill-advised joke by Don Imus, demanding Imus' termination.
Conclusion
The nature of Obama's prominent contacts is not just a question of judgment; it's a question of integrity, of being up front and honest about one's principles and agenda. Moreover, when given an opportunity to prove himself, Obama has not distinguished himself with his performance, his end results.
