Comments on: Krauthammer, Steyn, Obama, Grandmother

By: Scott

Scott — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 01:43:10 +0000

Hubbard,
And one more thing. If he did in fact omit this nuance, it makes him like any other politician; parsing words to score a political point. In either case, this is not where he wants to be, nor is it where he has positioned himself. Bad news for Obama all ’round.
Cheers.

By: Scott

Scott — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 01:37:52 +0000

Hubbard,
True enough. You are correct that his grandmother would have had reason to harbor this fear and that Obama certainly did not mention it. However, if anybody has the audacity (okay, pun intended) to question him about his own grandmother, I can imagine Obama making this argument.

By: Hubbard

Hubbard — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:16:42 +0000

Scott—

While it is possible that Obama was referring to different incidents in his speech and in his memoir, Dreams from my Father makes it clear that his grandmother had a reason to be afraid of some strange black men. That nuance was lost in Obama’s speech.

By: Scott

Scott — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:55:47 +0000

I am not inclined to come to the aid of Obama re: his grandmother, but could it not be argued that the anecdote in the speech is of a different incident than the one reported in his book? That is, his grandmother conveyed to Obama a generalized fear of black men independent of the story about the threatening homeless guy. Believe me, I am not trying to justify it. His equivalence here is obnoxious, but it does seem possible to me that both anecdotes are true and that one is not necessarily an exaggeration or lie based on the other.

By: Apollo

Apollo — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 22:44:19 +0000

Yet no one thinks he’s doing that.

Either he did that, or his speech was inaccurate. If you look at the words in those two sentences (”no more”) and their construction, it plainly draws two equivalences. The ways in which he was throwing around comparisons and calling people out (Ferraro, Wright, “conservative commentators”-AKA Rush, grandma, black community) it’s really hard to say which he thought was worse. He went on at length denouncing some unspecified comments from Wright; but no where did he explicitly say that Wright was worse than the others. That might have been helpful, though it seems plenty of people are willing to infer it out of good will.

I’d like for someone to ask him whether Wright’s comments were worse than Imus’s “nappy-headed hoes.” That would clear up a lot of issues regarding what sort of priorities Obama has and which direction his moral compass points.

By: conor friedersdorf

conor friedersdorf — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 19:01:04 +0000

Note that for your wrongheaded contention that Obama is drawing an equivalence between Rev. Wright and his gradmother were correct, it would necessarily follow, by the very construction of his speech, that Obama is drawing an equivalence between Rev. Wright and the entire black community.

Yet no one thinks he’s doing that.