When I was a pretty young, I told my dad that I wanted to go into politics. These days, I would have been immediately sent off for special evaluation and subsequently medicated. Back in the 70s, my dad simply told me that politics was a really dirty game and that everyone who got into it (including me in the future) ended up compromised. I didn’t believe him. Like on so many other things, it turns out my old man was right.
Barack Obama learned my dad’s lesson the hard way this week. His Pastor Jeremiah Wright hasn’t yielded. Rather than going away, the Reverend has come out to defend himself. I admire Reverend Wright’s guts, but he may have cost his friend a shot at the White House.
It wasn’t simply that Wright decided to go defensive and kept the story going. The Reverend went on the offensive and added chapters to it. Among other remarks, he speculated that the U.S. Government may have created HIV in order to get rid of minorities. Then, he went on in various appearances to give the impression that Obama’s previous comments condemning some of Wright’s past statements were made by Obama only out of political necessity. Talk about not helping…
A recent poll shows that the Reverend Wright issue among other missteps has hurt the Obama campaign. Hillary Clinton now does significantly better in hypothetical matchups against John McCain that Barack Obama does.
Senator Obama had heard and seen enough. Today, he went on the offensive himself with a much stronger stance against his former pastor. Obama even acknowledged that the relationship could never be the same. Essentially, he said goodbye to an old friend when that friend became a clear liability to his electability.
Clearly, Obama did what he had to. He got himself dirty. Politics always has a body count. Somewhere my dad is thinking “I told you so”.
