KRAUTHAMMER: His [Obama] speech was nothing more than less than apologia, an explaining away of Jeremiah Wright's rants done with elegance, nuance, and complexity.
Essentially, it said that--if you look at his remarks, this is what Obama was saying--he explained it away in two ways--moral equivalence, and white racism.
The moral equivalence is on the one hand you have Jeremiah Wright, and on the other hand you have Geraldine Ferraro. . . and grandma, who occasionally would utter a private, racist epithet, as if she had shouted these in a crowded church or a crowded theater as a way to arouse and envenom the audience as Wright did.
Obama is a guy who glories in his capacity for intellectual distinctions. There is a huge distinction between a woman of the generation of a Truman, who also uttered epithets about Jews and blacks in private, and the propagation of race hatred in a congregation on behalf of a pastor.
And the second element of that speech was extenuating, and explaining in a way as a reaction to white racism. He says, look, you have to put Wright in context, context is history, and the history he gave is a history of racism starting with slavery and ending at Jeremiah Wright and his anger and frustration.
This kind of extenuation is what you used to hear from Jesse Jackson, except in Obama's case, dressed up in Ivy League language and Harvard Law School nuance. And that's why the commentary that we saw on this was so rhapsodic. It touched two erogenous zones--white guilt and intellectual flattery. And that's all it was. I think it was a brilliantly conceived failure. [From RealClearPolitics.com]
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