Obama showed courage for refusing to dump his mentor

Wayne Dawkins/Commentary  3/29/2008

Call his March 18 speech the second Gettysburg address. You’ll want to remember where you were when you heard the senator’s words. It was a speech for the ages.

I admired his courage. U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., refused to take the easy way out and throw the Rev. Jeremiah Wright away in order to pacify a large segment of white voters. Refusing to cave could cost Obama his shot at president. Yet selling out so cheap would not be worth it.

I’m recalling what a friend, a foot soldier from the civil rights movement, once said: Some principles are non-negotiable. The non-negotiable act would have been Obama trashing a mentor and friend in order to get ahead. Would the cost have been worth it?

Based on a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll published March 27, Obama weathered criticisms about his former pastor. The senator did not lose ground to Democratic rival Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. The polls say voters’ negative impression of Clinton widened. Her exaggeration about being in a combat zone in the former Yugoslavia a dozen years ago wounded her. Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., sits in neutral until he knows who his Democratic opponent will be.

Many whites just learned that millions of respectable black folk maintained their sanity because of fiery – and yes inflammatory and off-color – rhetoric belching from the guts of preachers at black churches. Most black folk are accustomed to over-the-top comments from theologians. They understand that the preachers are speaking in metaphors. People in the pews know they are not being asked to act literally on preachers’ advice.

The white pundits who reacted hysterically to 6-year-old sound bites from Wright come off as dangerously out of touch. I don’t expect a response, but I fired this missive to National Review online/Los Angeles Times columnist Jonah Goldberg after reading his instructions before the Obama speech that the senator must tell black clergy why rhetoric like Wright’s is poisonous.

“You’re trippin’” I told Goldberg.

Obama knows he had no business lecturing black ministers about their pulpit decorum.

Then Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, a reliably trenchant columnist, sounded either naïve or too burrowed inside the Washington Beltway to write credibly about Obama’s judgment. Cohen believed Obama should have thrown Wright under the bus.

You don’t have to agree with your friends. Wright is an elder, so he remembers Jim Crow segregation and in-your-face racism. He is also a U.S. Marine and a veteran, a tough guy who defended America, even when America was ambivalent about defending him at home. How dare anyone question Wright’s patriotism, especially fair-weather Neo-con punks who talk tough, but are the first to run if our country asked then to fight.

Wright’s political style is not Obama’s style. Obama says he wants to bring all kinds of Americans together, but on March 18 he reminded these masses that he is a brotha. Obama was not going to toss Wright overboard any more than he would toss his white grandmother [Rush Limbaugh’s claim to the contrary], who loved him yet made anti-black statements that made him cringe.

The numerous white voters who migrated to Obama and his messages of hope have to deal with the boundaries he has drawn.

If these voters abandon Obama because they cannot accept his principled stand, the presidency is not worth his time. The Wall Street Journal-NBC poll results suggest many voters may not be scared off by a black candidate and refuses to be cowed by a racial character flaw alleged by pundits and adversaries like the gleeful GOP strategist Todd Harris who said Rev. Wright makes Minister Farrakhan look like “Hello Kitty.”

Yet the fire was contained. Remarkable.                                                                               

Dawkins is editor of the Black Alumni Network newsletter [Columbia University journalism], and he is a member of the Trotter Group www.trottergroup.org