The Discerning Texan

When pundits say that Obama “must define himself” or “introduce himself to the American people” they are on to something they don’t fully understand. Better to define his problem as this: Each time he soars with his lofty utopian rhetoric, the not-so-amnesiac voter frowns, and then remembers Wright’s hatred, Obama’s former investment in it, and the abject absence of a truly honest and principled discussion of his disturbing past subsidy of it.

A more honest candidate might have explained why a future president of the United States should never have abetted the racialist mentality, by encouraging, by his presence and purse at Trinity, some to blame others for their problems (increasingly silly in a multiracial society of various contending groups), and why as people first we cannot advance our own careers and agendas by investing in the tribe rather than in transcendent ideas and values.

So here we have the Obama paradox: The more he poses, and is praised, as the post-racial healer, the more 25 years of his career belie the rhetoric. In short, he now talks far more humanely than most about race, but the way in which he started and nourished his career proves that he was also far more cynical and divisive than most.

We now are down to two presidential candidates. One went to the Ivy League and Harvard Law School as a young man. The other spent years of his youth in a Vietnam Prisoner of War camp and suffered lifelong injuries. Guess which one whines more about his hardships?