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Stabbed in the Barack

The primary season in American presidential politics is without parallel, serving one overarching purpose of vetting candidates for the toughest and most demanding job in the free world.

Barack Hussein Obama entered the marathon of presidential politics with the thinnest resume of any aspirant to the White House in modern times.

He gamely set forth to win his party’s nomination by parlaying weakness, the very lightness of his empty political suit – a first term senator with no legislative record of any merit – into strength as a post-racism candidate promising to unite a divided country.

The gamble almost worked – it might still with the Democrats – for Obama’s empty suit rode the jet stream of political discontent in a country at war. The jet stream raised him to popular heights his party rivals with longer resumes could only watch with disbelief.

Obama’s candidacy, like any gamble, was a risky venture. It was made more risky given the tightly guarded knowledge that revelations about Rev. Jeremiah Wright – Obama’s pastor of some 20 years – could well bring down the junior senator’s “audacity of hope” to be elected America’s first non-white president.

The crash came this week when Wright appeared in public and confirmed to everyone that his bigoted ranting displayed on YouTube – which Obama, with the help of his liberal-left mainstream media friends explained away as “snippets of those sermons” taken out of context – were for real.

But Wright did more, as Bob Herbert of the New York Times wrote, by going to Washington “not to praise Barack Obama, but to bury him.”

The senator’s pastor derogatorily dismissed the promising post-racism candidate as a mere politician, meaning an individual who will say and do whatever is needed to get elected.

The question then is who has it right? Is it Wright who has known the aspiring politician for the past two decades, or is it Obama?

The candidate lately has been appalled that his pastor, preaching sermons laced with bigotry, is not the same person he knew and of whom he said some weeks ago in Philadelphia he “can no more disown than I can disown the black community.”

The American people will, of course, decide in November if Obama gets there from here, and it will most likely be a resounding repudiation of a presidential candidacy that Thomas Sowell described recently as “all talk – glib talk, exciting talk, confident talk, but still just talk.”

Sowell is an Afro-American, an economist and distinguished scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

But Sowell’s views will not be found in the mainstream media, nor will those of his colleague at the Hoover Institution, Shelby Steele, another Afro-American scholar who knows equally well from the inside the nature of “black” politics in America.

In Steele’s view Obama is unelectable because he “has fellow-travelled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother,” who was white.

Obama’s candidacy, to quote Steele again, has been “based more on manipulation of white guilt than on substance.”

The primary season has worked as it is meant to work, and for now it has brought down to earth a candidacy filled with hot air.

Salim Mansur
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