Chicago Daily Observer

Count me among those who wondered if the grandmother who worried about black men she passed on the street were still living. Answer: yes.

Here’s John Fund:

Mr. Obama’s campaign has made clear that his 84-year old grandmother, who has asked to be left alone, should be considered off-limits to political reporters. But yesterday, it was Mr. Obama who didn’t leave her alone when he used her for one of the central themes of his speech.

O. said he can’t disown Rev. Wright, who spoke from a pulpit to a crowded church that sold CD’s with his sermons recorded, any more than his grandmother, who raised him and along the way made “stereotypical” remarks in private that made him “cringe.”

Don’t they teach logic at Harvard? Or gratitude in church? Did Wright make him cringe?

Obama, Durkin said, waited until the past week to remove Wright from the campaign’s African American Leadership Council even though the campaign admits it knew months ago that Wright’s rhetoric could be a problem.

Further, Durkin said, Obama’s speech did not fully address the nature or scope of Wright’s remarks.

“Some people say these remarks were taken out of context, but I don’t know what other explanation you can offer. How you can say that what he said is not what he meant?” Durkin said. “He talks about the U.S. government injecting the AIDS virus into black Americans as a form of genocide. He’s suggests that somehow 9/11 was something America brought on itself.”

Obama’s long-standing and ongoing association with Wright, Durkin said, speaks to issues of judgment, which, he said, Obama has placed at the heart of his own campaign when applied to such issues as the Iraq ... Read More...

No question, Bear Stearns Cos. evokes the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed it. Politicians are already making analogies to Herbert Hoover, the demon of that period, and Franklin Roosevelt, the angel.

On March 16, Senator Charles Schumer of New York said on television: “We’re in the most serious economic problem we’ve been in a very long time—much worse than 2001. The president’s hands-off attitude is reminiscent of Herbert Hoover in 1929 and 1930.’’

Within 24 hours, Representative Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois Democrat, was weighing in with his own 1930s comparison. Roosevelt had pulled a country out of Depression and united it; President George W. Bush was doing the opposite, he said.

You get the picture: Bush is like Hoover, the do-nothing. Democrats are like Roosevelt, the activist.

Barack Obama’s speech in Philadelphia yesterday designed to douse the flames caused by his on-again, off-again disinheritance of and then endorsement of, Rev. Jeremiah Wright was pretty—but sorry, no cigar.

Moreover it is a case history of a political disaster. Obama was never stronger when he ran…as he did initially…as a man of mixed color untouched by the old racial bromides that pock-marked our society for fifty years. He was of a new generation. Not only is he lighter in complexion than the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton, he is much younger, more free-flowing, less taken with himself with wit (something the senior Jackson at least never evidenced). Juggling the hand-mike before a rapt audience, Barack Obama looks like the new generation, unencumbered with the old hand-me-down racial stereotypes.

Then along comes the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Laden with the old rhetoric he is a recycled Minister Louis Farrakhan. ... Read More...