PrintJanuary 16, 2008
Obama's 'spiritual mentor' plays the Lewinsky card
The Baltimore Sun reports on the sermon delivered last Sunday by Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr., the man Barack Obama describes as his "spiritual mentor."
News Alert 9 and Sweetness&Light draw our attention to the following rather significant verbiage [emphasis added] coming from the pulpit of Trinity United Community Church, the charity to which Obama contributes more than any other.
On Sunday morning - amid intensified crossfire between Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Obama over the use of race in the Democratic presidential campaign - Wright was preaching from the Gospel of John, using his powerful style to link the story of the loaves and fishes to a contemporary political message.
Man should not put limits on what God can do, but that's what people always do, he told the crowd. Just as God made five loaves and two fishes feed thousands, God has provided liberators for blacks in the past - from Nat Turner to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and now Barack Obama. But, Wright said, there were always reasons not to follow them.
Some argue that blacks should vote for Clinton "because her husband was good to us," he continued.
"That's not true," he thundered. "He did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky."
Many in the crowd were on their feet, applauding - amazed, amused and moved by the fiery rhetoric of their preacher, who is about to retire.
Truce or no truce, the bitterness evoked by the internal squabble over race in the Democratic Party apparently isn't going away. The irresistible force of the Clinton Machine may have met the immovable object of blacks deciding that the party of race preferences owes the first viable black presidential candidate what it prescribes in other government and private bureaucracies.
Maybe the Democrats will be able to defuse this confrontation. Maybe the Clintons will decide to fold up their tent and let others win. That would be a first. Or maybe Obama will decide that he can wait, although this might encourage the emergence of other black candidates with equally or more polished resumes and actual administrative experience (for example, Newark Mayor Cory Booker). And maybe Rev. Wright and other black advocates will step aside and once again allow the Clintons to put themselves first.
Or maybe the Democrat snake has swallowed its race preferences tail, and can't stop.
