This post on the Belmont Club site paints a troubling picture of Rev. Wright and Black Liberation Theology. According to James Cone, one of the founders of Black Liberation Theology

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community ... Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.

In Cone’s formulation--and by extension Wright’s--any God who isn’t "black" is an agent of the devil.

Ben Stein has been pumping for higher taxes on the "very rich" in the Sunday business section of the New York Times for a while now, I guess as a way of keeping in good graces with the NYT editors or something.

But the other day I was sitting in the lobby of a boutique luxury hotel in midtown Manhattan when a stretch Bentley the size of Delaware coasted up to the curb, and out stepped an obviously super-wealthy and well-appointed couple, who were greeted by practically the entire management staff of the hotel. The manager proudly announced to the couple that they were being bunked in the hotel’s presidential suite, whereupon the uber-coiffed wife said, "Well certainly not the current president!"

Someone else gave a speech last week. As far as I know, President Bush’s speech on the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war has received no comment on this blog yet. It also did not make a big splash in the news, in part because it said nothing new. The President repeated that we are fighting terrorists or al Qaeda in Iraq so we won’t have to fight them here. A short time before the speech, a review of 600,000 documents captured in Iraq appeared, concluding that Saddam’s regime had links to regional and global terrorism but that there was no direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.

Via Hugh Hewitt, there’s this column from Mark Steyn and this from Michael Barone.

Inveighing against injustice is one thing--and I won’t begrudge anyone that, even if I don’t agree with the mode of expression and perhaps even the instances cited--but adopting utterly implausible conspiracy theories is another. Couldn’t Obama have distinguished between "prophetic" hyperbole and the tinfoil hat variety?

Will the millenials care?

Until I read the interview with Justice Thomas, to which Joe links below, I had not read the Judiciary Act of 1789 in quite some time, and had forgotten that it prescribes an oath of office for Justices (Section 8).

Justice Thomas notes that he takes his oath of office seriously. The text of the oath reads: To "solemnly swear or affirm, that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent on me as , according to the best of my abilities and understanding, agreeably to the constitution, and laws of the United States. So help me God."

What stands out is the line, "and do equal right to the poor and to the rich."

Given the time and place at which the oath was written, the language was probably ultimately traceable to Leviticus 19:15: "You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor." If so, it might have interesting implications for our establishment clause jurisprudence.

The goddess Fortuna does not ordinarily arrange for her favorites to spend five-and-a-half years being tortured in a prisoner-of-war camp. Nevertheless, the Economist may be on to something when it calls John McCain the “luckiest man in American politics.” Not only did he secure the Republican nomination seven months after his campaign nearly collapsed. Now, with a little more than seven months to go before November, it is becoming increasingly clear that Barack Obama cannot lose the Democratic nomination, and cannot win the general election.

In today’s Politico, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen argue that Hillary Clinton “has virtually no chance of winning” the Democratic nomination. One Clinton advisor, off the record, estimates her chances against Obama as no better than ten percent.

The reason? Race. Clinton’s only path to the nomination requires Democratic superdelegates “to risk a backlash of historic proportions from the party’s most reliable constituency. . . . An African-American opponent and his backers would be told that, even though he won the contest with voters, the prize is going to someone else. People who think that scenario is even remotely likely are living on another planet.”

There might be a semi-plausible pretext for the superdelegates to take the trophy out of Obama’s hands and give it Clinton if she wins the larger number of all the popular votes cast in all the primaries and caucuses from Iowa on January 3rd to Puerto Rico on June 7th. The Politico’s Ben Smith got out his calculator, however, and showed that Clinton will need “well over 60 percent of the vote” in the remaining states where she is likely to win. So far in 2008 her best states have been Arkansas, where she was first lady for 12 years and won 70 percent of the vote; Rhode Island, which gave her 58 percent; and New York, which she has represented in the Senate since 2000 and where she received 57 percent.

Why is Obama unlikely to win the general election? Again, race. Even before the Jeremiah Wright controversy became front-page news last week, there was growing evidence that despite all the talk about his post-racial candidacy, Barack Obama is not the Tiger Woods of politics. As VandeHei and John Harris pointed out earlier this week, Obama has won a majority of white votes in several states, including Wisconsin and Virginia – a historic achievement.

In the Ohio primary, however, held before Jeremiah Wright became a household name, Hillary Clinton took 64 percent of the white vote. Similarly, Obama has finished first among Latino voters in only handful of states, none of which have particularly large Hispanic populations.

John McCain is well-situated to appeal to “Reagan Democrats” – working-class whites who didn’t go to college, and Latinos. His heroic patriotism will appeal strongly to the former, especially against an opponent whose pastor invites his parishioners to scorn America. And McCain’s support of immigration reform will allow him to contest the Latino vote.

Obama’s Wright problem, for the general election, is that it gives voters in both these blocs, who might otherwise have felt guilty about voting against a black candidate, a way to do so with a clear conscience. There is nothing racist about voting against Obama anymore. Now, it’s just a matter of voting against a politician who feels comfortable around spiritual leaders whose views are as poisonous as Ward Churchill’s.

Did you know that the CIA website has a kids’ page?

Charles Murray enters the lists on the side that finds more to praise than blame in Obama’s speech.

The virtue of Philip Gorski’s annoyingly sententious post is that it states frankly the basis of the unity I found in Barack Obama’s "perfect union" speech. A snippet:

Crusader nationalism and racial division are really two sides of the same coin. If crusader nationalism is the bond, or one of the bonds, that holds defense conservatives and religious conservatives together, racial division is the wedge that was used to separate the “Reagan Democrats” from the New Deal coalition. The first step in the construction of the Reagan coalition was, of course, the Southern strategy of Richard Nixon, the use of carefully coded race-baiting to alienate working-class whites from the Democratic party. From Nixon’s allusions to “states rights” and “law and order” through Reagan’s “welfare queens” and Bush Sr.’s “Willie Horton” ad, this has been a staple of Republican campaigns for over three decades.

To make a new Democratic coalition, one must therefore unmake the Reagan coalition. The first step is racial reconciliation. But if racial solidarity is to be deconstructed, what will take its place? That is the question to which Obama’s speech is an answer. And his answer is civil religion.

***

Insofar as the Republican coalition relies on racial antagonism, unmaking it requires racial reconciliation. But that is only a first step. The second step is to reconfigure the party landscape around class, to establish an alliance between the economically underprivileged and the culturally privileged, between those bereft of economic capital (black and white), and those rich in cultural capital (the “latte liberals”). Of course, the language of class is verboten in American public discourse. And Obama does not use it. Instead, in an Edwards moment, Obama argues that “the real culprits of the middle class squeeze ” are “a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.” Here, he invokes the approved language of populism, pitting ordinary people against greedy corporations and Washington lobbyists, against economic exploiters and pseudo-intellectuals.

This language has a second advantage as well. Not only does it allow him to elide the forbidden language of “class warfare.” It also allows him to invoke the language of democratic sovereignty and national identity. For “the people” is a term that plays on two registers: class as well as nation. In this way, demands for social justice are implicitly linked with claims to popular sovereignty and patriotism. And rejection of those demands appears as un-democratic and un-American.

So Obama’s "civil religion" is a form of class consciousness, albeit one expressed soothingly and smilingly.

There are a couple of other things about the post that serve, I think, to undermine its credibility (and that of its author). First, there’s this caricature of the Republican coalition:

One of the great, unremarked advantages of the Republican coalition over the last three decades has been its ethnic and cultural homogeneity. Apart from a few Jewish and black neo-conservatives — the Bill Kristols and Ken Blackwells — it is overwhelmingly white and evangelical.

Tell that to the Catholics, a majority of whom voted for GWB in 2004 and a significant minority of whom continue to identify with the GOP. Tell it to the business Republicans who regularly express disdain for evangelicals. Of course, it serves Gorski’s (and Obama’s?) version of civil religion to paint Republicans as "the Other."

If, as Steve notes below, "We’re all originalists now," might we be able to revisit the absurd notion that being born on U.S. soil is a sufficient condition for citizenhip. As Ed Erler notes, that conclusion is a far cry from the orignial intent of the Fourteenth Amendment.

If Obama’s speech makes him a socialist, Progressive, etc, etc., then Condoleezza Rice, who wrote in Foreign Affairs of the need for the United States to be on the right side of history, is a Marxist-Leninist.

But seriously folks, it was a political speech and while it is fun to find all sorts of emanations and penumbras in it, I think you are missing what the man actually said. Given the state of public discourse, it is good that he did not repudiate the constitution and actually claimed that it has principles embedded in it. Lucas is right that Obama’s specific policy recommendations are a problem. That is the weakness that should be attacked. Lucas is also right to ask us to consider what Obama says about the black American experience, which no one on this blog has attempted yet. That is why I still find much of what is being said here fussy and doctrinaire and, I must say, beside the point.

Mike Huckabee is getting some favorable play over at The Daily Kos because of his attempt to see the Rev. Wright with charitable eyes. He’s not eliciting much sympathy, however, from some conservative commentators--like Laura Ingraham--who takes the view that his remarks on Joe Scarborough’s show are something people of a younger generation cannot process. She sees it as a scolding that is not relevant to today’s world. Something that we might visit in a museum. "We’re so over [race] now," she said this morning. In a way, I think both are right.

I am no great fan of Mike Huckabee’s and I’ve never tried to hide the fact here, but I think his remarks about Wright represent the views of most thoughtful and decent people who witnessed (whether in person or in absentia) the horrors and injustice of a bygone era. Like Obama, they ask us to understand the anger. Dennis Miller expressed something similar recently when he said that when he looked at Wright he saw a grumpy old Marine who had been called the "N" word too many times. To be clear . . . Miller did not say that this excused his behavior nor--I think--did Huckabee.

My cranky take on Obama’s "Perfect Union" speech can be read here.

The short of it is that Obama is Lincolnesque only if you overlook his failure to mention the Declaration of Independence, his rather cursory attention to Constitutional limits, and his playing the "mystic chords" of class warfare.

My prediction regarding Obama’s speech pretty much came to pass. He used the historic location of Philadelphia not only to praise our nation’s ideals and call attention to their inconsistent practice, but also to reveal the ways in which black Americans, in particular, regard this “gap” between “promise” and “reality” a troublesome feature of the American polity. In addition, he used this discussion as the touchstone for his nimble criticism and defense of his “former pastor,” as well as jump-starting what he hoped would be a national conversation about race in America.

While he did not go so far as to quote Bill Clinton’s 1st Inaugural Address (“There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed by what is right with America”), as I anticipated Obama did approximate the sentiment by stating that “the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution . . . [with] the ideal of equal citizenship under the law.” He one-upped the former president by addressing the question of race in America with all the candor, sophistication, and grace that was lacking from Clinton’s town hall meetings on the subject. As misguided as I believe Obama’s actual policies would be (on race and other issues), his speech landed between a "Sister Souljah moment" and Martin Luther’s King’s "I Have a Dream" speech, coming closer to the latter than the former in its high-minded appreciation of America’s noblest principles and its clear-sighted recognition of America’s inconsistent practices.

There’s a lot to comment on in his 43-minute speech, but I will close with two more observations (for now, as I am sure to hear soon enough about what I missed or got wrong). First, leaving aside his bold, nuanced criticism/defense of the Rev. Wright, here is a cynic’s schematic of the partisan message of Obama’s speech:

To solve America’s “monumental problems,” Americans need UNITY.

To become unified, Americans need to CHANGE politics as usual.

To change our politics, Americans need to follow someone who not only believes in a different way of doing things, but also literally embodies the UNITY and CHANGE the country needs.

Ecce homo: Barack Obama.

I hasten to add that it was not just a partisan speech, and not simply because Obama says he is practicing a new kind of politics. To miss the non-partisan elements of his speech is to miss an opportunity to learn what Republicans in particular must learn in order to improve their prospects among black Americans. As Aretha Franklin put it, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.” We can “find out what it means” to them by beginning with Obama’s rendering of the black church and the black American experience as a heritage that entails “embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of the past.” Well put; now discuss.

My second observation: The underlying question for candidate Obama is, what is the basis of American union? How would he lead so that the diversity of the American people becomes a unity that strengthens rather than a division that weakens us? The Party of Lincoln believes the central idea of American union is human equality, understood as the equal possession of the rights of humanity (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), whereby government exists to secure or protect the exercise of these God-given, natural rights.

As far as I can make out, the Democrats believe the American union is not the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, as Obama preaches in true e pluribus unum fashion, but merely a coalition of supplicant interests beholden to a national government. The notion of a common good that Democrats tout is less about the prosperity of a free, industrious, and self-governing people and more about a common condition of want, desperation, and disability. Does Obama recognize that the self-help gospel practiced by Obama and preached by the Rev. Wright would be undermined by the very policies he, as a Democrat, recommends?

Peter. All good points. In my post below, I should have started by saying that Obama gave quite a speech. It was eloquent, and it was refreshing to see a man of the Left ground his thoughts in America’s constitutional tradition, and to hear him appeal to basic American principles.

That’s all to the good. Perhaps he can help improve America’s race problem. On that point, that’s why distancing himself from Rev. Wright might be a bad idea. Wright’s ideas, as far as I can tell, are mainstream in black America. A man who wishes to bring America’s black community closer to the America’s mainstream might have to keep his connections with men like Wright for that reason. That is particularly true for someone who is half-African an half white, (and an Ivy Leaguer) rather than African-American.

On the other hand, Obama seems to think that America’s principles are the principles of Progressivism. The second half of the speech is, at heart, socialistic. I don’t think that circle can be squared. But on the other hand, he does make nods to the importance of self-help. Once again, perhaps he needs to talk that way to bring the Old Lefties along, and to help us move from a welfare state to an oppotunity society. (Obama’s voting record makes me think twice about that interpretation, but it is plausible).

The great question for America’s conservatives today seems to be this: now that we’re three-quarters of a century past the start of the New Deal, our tradition is a big-government tradition. That tradition rests in precarious tension with the principles of the founding. That being the case, statesmanship is a tall order.

I suspect that Obama’s policy bias it toward centralized solutions, decided by smart, Ivy League types in Washington, just as it was for the Progressives. That’s tied to his "unity" theme. Last night on TV, Frank Luntz highlighted his phrase: "Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive." The phrase suggests that Wright’s divisiveness is his greatest sin. It’s worse than his "wrong."