And used the same Winner Take All Primary System we do, what would the delegate count look like? Rassmussen Reports’ Wesley Little provides the answer.

One normally doesn’t expect Ann Coulter to supply serious commentary and analysis. Her specialty is a stinging barb at the liberals’ expense, often playfully crossing the line into the realm of prohibited speech.

Her latest column in Human Events, however, discussing Barack Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, features some essential insights pertaining to the heart and mind and the fundamental methodology of a major candidate.

As Ann Coulter rightly notes, virtually no one has read Obama’s book.

Has anybody read this book? Inasmuch as the book reveals Obama to be a flabbergasting lunatic, I gather the answer is no. Obama is about to be our next president: You might want to take a peek. If only people had read “Mein Kampf” …

Peeking into Obama’s Dreams, Coulter finds the tone is significantly different from what one would have expected. Obama is really an angry black man. A very angry black man.

Nearly every page — save the ones dedicated to cataloguing the mundane details of his life — is bristling with anger at some imputed racist incident. The last time I heard this much race-baiting invective I was … in my usual front-row pew, as I am every Sunday morning, at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Then Coulter strikes gold, finding the key to Obama’s entire political methodology and personal style, right there in black and white.

When his mother expresses concern about Obama’s high school friend being busted for drugs, Obama says he patted his mother’s hand and told her not to worry.

This, too, prompted Obama to share with his readers a life lesson on how to handle white people: “It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved — such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.” …

This technique seems to be the basis of Obama’s entire presidential campaign.

And Coulter warns:

Forget Rev. Jeremiah Wright — Wright is Booker T. Washington compared to this guy.

Ann Coulter may very possibly be right. All this would certainly explain the Jeremiah Wright-Trinity Church connection. The 2008 Presidential Election may very possibly feature as the current front-runner an extreme black nationalist, harboring a pathological psychic collection of racial animosities, deliberately spoofing the American public with an emollient facade: Malcolm X hiding behind the mask of Sidney Poitier. What on earth would someone with such views actually do in office?

0:31 video

Hillary’s original and Obama’s response link

Saturday Night Live parody link

——————————————

But Bird Dog at Maggie’s Farm provides the definitive, last word on Hillary’s 3AM ad.

The Republican Party is about to nominate a man whose past loyalty to the GOP, Conservatism, and the current Republican Administration obviously leaves a great deal to be desired.

Back in 2001, John McCain denied having any reasons for, or intentions of, leaving the Republican Party.” Last year, his spokesman told Power Line that there was no truth in stories that John McCain had considered leaving the GOP.

But former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, currently out promoting a new book, has just leaked his own recollections of private democrat party negotiations with McCain.

According to Sidney Blumenthal, a senior adviser for former President Bill Clinton and current adviser to Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Clinton, at one point McCain was going to leave the Republican Party and caucus with Senate Democrats.

“And although he doesn’t want to talk to reporters about it now, there was a time and I was privy to some of those who were involved, did conduct negotiations through third parties about whether or not he would leave the Republican Party and become an independent more or less aligned in the Senate with the Democrats,” said Blumenthal on April 1. Blumenthal did not say when those negotiations took place.

Of course, this revelation is not completely new

A story dated 3/28/07 from the Hill features a similar account.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was close to leaving the Republican Party in 2001, weeks before then-Sen. Jim Jeffords (Vt.) famously announced his decision to become an Independent, according to former Democratic lawmakers who say they were involved in the discussions.

In interviews with The Hill this month, former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and ex-Rep. Tom Downey (D-N.Y.) said there were nearly two months of talks with the maverick lawmaker following an approach by John Weaver, McCain’s chief political strategist.

Democrats had contacted Jeffords and then-Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.) in the early months of 2001 about switching parties, but in McCain’s case, they said, it was McCain’s top strategist who came to them.

Dan Calabrese published the account provided by Hillary Clinton’s former boss.

As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying.

The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes.

Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.

Why?

“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”

How could a 27-year-old House staff member do all that? She couldn’t do it by herself, but Zeifman said she was one of several individuals – including Marshall, special counsel John Doar and senior associate special counsel (and future Clinton White House Counsel) Bernard Nussbaum – who engaged in a seemingly implausible scheme to deny Richard Nixon the right to counsel during the investigation.

Why would they want to do that? Because, according to Zeifman, they feared putting Watergate break-in mastermind E. Howard Hunt on the stand to be cross-examined by counsel to the president. Hunt, Zeifman said, had the goods on nefarious activities in the Kennedy Administration that would have made Watergate look like a day at the beach – including Kennedy’s purported complicity in the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro.

The actions of Hillary and her cohorts went directly against the judgment of top Democrats, up to and including then-House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, that Nixon clearly had the right to counsel. Zeifman says that Hillary, along with Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar, was determined to gain enough votes on the Judiciary Committee to change House rules and deny counsel to Nixon. And in order to pull this off, Zeifman says Hillary wrote a fraudulent legal brief, and confiscated public documents to hide her deception.

Read the whole thing.

Can Hillary Clinton possibly survive this news story? Tune in for the next episode in Campaign 2008: the Bloodbath.

Via Ed Morrissey.

The Sunday New York Times Magazine this week had a feature by Benjamin Wallace-Wells profiling Oklahoma Congressman Tom Cole, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, and discussing Cole’s uphill task this year.

Going into the 2008 elections, Cole faces a daunting list of challenges. To date, 29 of his party’s representatives in Congress have retired, an unusually large number, leaving open politically marginal seats that incumbents might have held but which will be more difficult for challengers to defend — Deborah Pryce’s seat in Columbus, Ohio; Mike Ferguson’s in central New Jersey; Heather Wilson’s around Albuquerque; Thomas M. Reynolds’s in Buffalo. Reynolds, Cole’s predecessor at the N.R.C.C., just narrowly held his seat in 2006. Rick Renzi, a Republican congressman from Arizona, was indicted last month on federal corruption charges, putting what was another safe Republican seat in play. These vacancies mean that in a year when, by historical standards, his party would be expected to win back seats, Cole will have to defend many more seats than he will be able to attack (only six Democratic incumbents have announced they are leaving office). His committee has approximately $5 million on hand, roughly one-eighth the amount of cash on hand as its Democratic counterpart, which at latest count had $38 million. …

Many within the Democratic Party believe that the gains of the 2006 election weren’t merely the result of good strategy. They believe that the map was undergoing a fundamental shift. Perhaps the most-studied Democratic detailer of the map’s evolution is a consultant named Mark Gersh, whose analysis of the 2006 election results has become the Democratic Party’s official version. “Most people think of politics as changing from the grass roots up,” Gersh says. “It doesn’t. It changes from the top, from presidential races on down.”

For Gersh, the modern political map has sustained two basic changes in the past 30 years. The first, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 but only culminating with the 1994 election of Newt Gingrich’s insurgents, was the slow, top-down conversion of socially conservative blue-collar voters, in the South and elsewhere, from Democratic partisans to Republican ones. In 2006, Gersh saw the culmination of the second big shift. “The biggest thing that happened in 2006 was the final movement of upper-income, well-educated, largely suburban voters to the Democrats, which started in 1992,” he says. The largest concentrations of districts that flipped were in the suburbs and the Northeast. This, Gersh says, was the equal and opposite reaction to the earlier movement toward the Republicans and to some degree a product of the social conservatism demanded by the Republican majority. When I spoke to Emanuel earlier this month, he told me: “I believe there’s a suburban populism now. The Republican Party has abandoned any economic, cultural or social connection to those districts.” …

Many Republican operatives now worry that crucial segments of the electorate are slipping away from them. Republicans had traditionally won the votes of independents; in 2006, they lost them by 18 percent. Hispanic voters, who gave the Democrats less than 60 percent of their votes in 2004, cast more than 70 percent of their votes for Democrats in 2006. Suburban voters, long a Republican constituency, favored Democrats in 2006 for the first time since 1992. And Democrats won their largest share of voters under 30 in the modern era, a number particularly troubling for some Republicans, since it seems to indicate the preferences of an entire generation.

“What is concerning is that we lost ground in every one of the highest-growth demographics,” said Mehlman, the former R.N.C. chairman and Bush political adviser, who is now a lawyer at the lobbying firm Akin Gump.

Tom Cole, however, thinks the situation is not hopeless.

Cole’s basic challenge is to try to flip the popular perception of the capital so that more voters identify Washington with the Democrats than with the Republicans. He says he wants to use his party’s resources to define Nancy Pelosi as a national character, the face of a Democratic Congress that is once again too liberal for the country. (“Those three little words — ‘San Francisco liberal’ — are just magic for fund-raising,” one of Cole’s staff members told me.) He has tried, when possible, to choose candidates whose biographies can reinforce the anti-Washington theme, even if they have no real political experience. And he is counting on McCain’s emergence to permit the party to distance its image from that of Bush. Cole might have come up with a grand and unifying policy vision for his insurgents to run on. But Cole is not an ideologue. And with Rove and the party’s other grand strategists having abandoned the field — five of the six members of the Republican Congressional leadership in 2006 have now retired — Cole is now turning to practical answers, to process, and deferring to the politically moderate geography of the battleground areas. “I still think most Americans want their government to be smaller, not bigger, and their taxes to be lower, not higher,” Cole says. “And I still think most Democrats in office think that America is not a force for good in the world, and I think most voters have a different perspective.”

But Wallace-Wells believes the GOP coalition and platform are in serious trouble.

Part of the problem, for a Republican Party that wants to get back to basics, is that George Bush and Karl Rove’s party was not theirs alone but a pretty precise articulation of decades of post-’60s Republican strategy. “You go back to the Reagan years, and even before that, and we always had a three-legged stool: anti-Communism, anti-abortion and tax and spend,” Dan Mattoon, the Republican lobbyist and former deputy chairman of Cole’s committee, told me. “The first leg dropped off when the Berlin Wall fell, and after 9/11 we’ve tried to do the same thing with terrorism, but it’s not as strong. The second leg, tax and spend, was pretty strong until George Bush. Then we had just one leg of the stool, which was social issues, and I think that you look at the makeup of the younger generation and there’s more of a libertarian view on social issues.” Cole says that the party’s rhetoric on issues like gay marriage has cast Republicans as too reactionary for many suburban districts. “My problem on social issues is the tone — sometimes we have been too shrill, and that has alienated voters who might otherwise have joined us.

In other words, he is repeating the conventional viewpoint that the Reagan coalition of anti-communist neocons, religious and social conservatives, and economic conservatives has fallen apart.

I think it’s more the case that the Republican coalition, under George W. Bush, has fallen into disarray for lack of articulate and firmly principled leadership.

Bush is so inarticulate that it isn’t easy at all to identify a coherent Bush philosophy, but it seems clear that he has always been a moderate on Government, and is in many ways a liberal (resembling Woodrow Wilson) in foreign policy. Bush’s so-called conservatism has generally consisted of a manifest rejection of the consensus of the elect as articulated in the elite media outlets, which is widely recognized as an expression of a visceral animosity on Bush’s part to his own native elite culture.

Therein really consists his unforgivable sin from the point of view of the Establishment left. And Bush’s folly has proven to be his willingness to provoke their ultimate degree of wrath in the absence of an effective ability to fight them in public debate or within government.

Amusingly, Bush got away with his fundamentally happy-go-lucky approach right up until 2005 Hurricane Katrina. He seemed to be made of teflon. Media attacks simply bounced off him, and the American public in general indifferently shrugged off his malapropisms with a smile until along came New Orleans. The MSM was able to flood televisions screens with images of disaster while blaming them on Bush Administration incompetence and callousness. Blame for Katrina finally stuck.

Simultaneously, the disinformation operation conducted by disaffected elements of the Intelligence Community proceeded without White House interference or effective opposition. The passage of a couple of years proved adequate for the media echo chamber to persuade large portions of the public that “Bush lied.” There were no Iraqi WMD, and Bush knew it all along. He started the war “for the oil,” or to avenge Saddam Hussein’s attempt to assassinate his father.

The collapse of Bush Administration political activity coincided with a series of Republican Congressional scandals, and together produced the public perception of a failed and discredited GOP and the subsequent loss of both houses of Congress.

Bush’s failures seem to be amplified by the failures of the Conservative Movement. The Conservative Movement chose the time of Republican disarray to try mobilizing the base with a red meat issue. And what did they chose? Anti-illegal immigration. Anti-illegal immigration politics worked beautifully in transforming California into a firmly democrat stronghold. Why not take the same strategy, certain to alienate Hispanic voters, nationally?

Both George W. Bush and the current organized Conservative Movement demonstrably arrived at the 2008 primary campaign season without a defined candidate, a coherent strategy, or a clue.

The consequence was John McCain’s victory, produced by a combination of media bias and cross-over democrat voting in open primaries. Essentially, we are running the moderate democrat candidate this year as the Republican nominee.

If the Conservative Movement and the GOP does not return to the kind of politics practiced by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, to a politics based on a coherent and principled philosophy, to clearly articulated ideas, to a policy of winning elections by winning the long-term national debate, they are going to find the GOP stool has no leg to stand on at all.

In Newsweek, Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s political strategist supreme, pitches in to help out the Clinton and Obama campaigns.

It will be a contested convention, Karl predicts.

After the last Democratic primary is held in early June, neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama will have enough votes from delegates elected in caucuses or primaries to be declared the nominee. Obama would have to win 76 percent and Clinton 98 percent of the 535 delegates that are at stake in the final eight contests. Neither will happen.

How do you win one of those?

Control the Convention Mechanism. If you set the rules, decide who votes, organize the event and control what is said, it’s almost impossible to lose. So while Democratic National Committee chief Howard Dean is ostensibly in charge, both candidates would be well advised to gain control of the levers of the convention.

Three committees are key. The Rules Committee is where trouble can begin. Someone will come up with a smooth-sounding rules change that will give one candidate the advantage or the appearance of having a majority of the delegates. There will be an early test vote: the key is to pick what it is and win it. It’s likely to be obscure—the election of a temporary chairman, say—or contrived. But it will establish who’s in charge.

Read the whole thing.

Maureen Dowd gives a pretty good summary of the liberal perspective on public affairs on the editorial page of today’s New York Times.

Politics, you see, is really a branch of the entertainment industry. What matters is fashion and perception. George W. Bush’s foreign policy has been opposed by the international community of fashion, and by provoking its wrath, Bush has damaged the image of the United States. The decision on whom to elect president in 2008 needs to be made on image grounds.

It’s all about the magic, really.

And whether we can take a flier on this skinny guy with the strange name and braided ancestry to help us get it back.

Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister of France and a strong supporter of the United States, recently observed that President Bush has done such a number on our image in the world that no one will be able to restore the luster.

“I think the magic is over,” he said.

Pas si vite, mon vieux. In terms of style, the Obamas could give Carla Bruni-Sarkozy a run for her euros. …

Obama, like the preternaturally gifted young heroes in mythical tales, is still learning to channel his force. He can ensorcell when he has to, and he has viral appeal. Who else could alchemize a nuanced 40-minute speech on race into must-see YouTube viewing for 20-year-olds?

But at several crucial points in the last year, he held back when he should have poured on, leaving his nemesis around to damage him further.

Obama has social engineering plans as ambitious, in their own way, as the Bush administration’s failed social engineering plans to change the psyche of America and the Middle East.

“I think the president needs to use the bully pulpit to change our culture,” he said Thursday, talking energy at a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser in Manhattan. “We are a wasteful culture. It’s always been that way because of our history. We do everything big.”

He wants to make government “cool” again. He wants to banish the red-blue culture of conflict on TV and in Washington. And he wants to make the country healthier, thinner and smarter. “I want our students learning art and music and science and poetry,” he says, in a crowd-pleasing line.

From image flows practical effect, in Dowd’s fantasy. All you have to do is elect this season’s smooth-talking democrat, and abracadabra! all over America, healthier and thinner children are learning “art and music and science and poetry.” The bitter divisions of race and class, city and country, left and right vanish overnight. Republican deer-hunters need only listen to the latest Obama speech on YouTube, and they are instantly converted into tree-hugging socialist supporters of Sarah Brady. The entire country, from sea to shining sea, is magically transformed into one super-sized version of Berkeley, California.

For a liberal, it must be pretty to think so.

Democrats are really going to hate this extremely effective McCain campaign ad.

12:02 video

A number of commentators on the Right (mostly chicks) responded to Obama’s speech with adulation.

But curmudgeonly old Victor Davis Hanson does not get misty quite so easily. In fact, he is enough of a spoilsport to undermine all those rapturous cries of admiration from the establishment punditocracy by remarking, sotto voce, that the Emperor Obama’s rhetorical wardrobe of political change amounts to no clothes at all.

The latest polls reflecting Obama’s near-collapse should serve as a morality tale of John Edwards’s two Americas — the political obtuseness of the intellectual elite juxtaposed to the common sense of the working classes.

For some bizarre reason, Obama aimed his speech at winning praise from National Public Radio, the New York Times, and Harvard, and solidifying an already 90-percent solid African-American base — while apparently insulting the intelligence of everyone else.

Indeed, the more op-eds and pundits praised the courage of Barack Obama, the more the polls showed that there was a growing distrust that the eloquent and inspirational candidate has used his great gifts, in the end, to excuse the inexcusable.

The speech and Obama’s subsequent interviews neither explained his disastrous association with Wright, nor dared open up a true discussion of race — which by needs would have to include, in addition to white racism, taboo subjects ranging from disproportionate illegitimacy and drug usage to higher-than-average criminality to disturbing values espoused in rap music and unaddressed anti-Semitism. We learn now that Obama is the last person who wants to end the establishment notion that a few elite African Americans negotiate with liberal white America over the terms of grievance and entitlement — without which all of us really would be transracial persons, in which happiness and gloom hinge, and are seen to do so, on one’s own individual success or failure.

Instead there were the tired platitudes, evasions, and politicking. The intelligentsia is well aware of how postmodern cultural equivalence, black liberation theory, and moral relativism seeped into Obama’s speech, and thus was not offended by an “everybody does it” and “who’s to judge?/eye of the beholder” defense. But to most others the effect was Clintonian. Somehow Obama could not just say,

There is nothing to be offered for Rev. Wright except my deepest apologies for not speaking out against his venom far earlier. We in the African-American community know better than anyone the deleterious effects of racist speech, and so it is time for Rev. Wright and myself to part company, since we have profoundly different views of both present- and future-day America.

The more the pundits gushed about the speech, the more the average Americans thought, “Wait a minute — did he just say what I thought he said?” It’s not lost on Joe Q. Public that Obama justified Wright’s racism by offering us a “landmark” speech on race that:

(1) Compared Wright’s felony to the misdemeanors of his grandmother, Geraldine Ferraro, the Reagan Coalition, corporate culture, and the kitchen sink.

(2) Established the precedent that context excuses everything, in the sense that what good a Wright did (or an Imus did) in the past outweighs any racist outburst of the present.

(3) Claimed that the voice of the oppressed is not to be judged by the same rules of censure as the dominant majority that has no similar claim on victim status.

What is happening, ever so slowly, is that the public is beginning to realize that it knows even less after the speech than it did before about what exactly Obama knew (and when) about Wright’s racism and hatred.

Even elites will wake up to the fact that they’ve been had, in a sense, once they deconstruct the speech carefully and fathom that their utopian candidate just may have managed to destroy what was once a near-certain Democratic sweep in the fall.

Read the whole thing.

Fred Barnes observes that this year the fates have been playing on John McCain’s team.

John McCain is one lucky fellow. Of course you can make your own luck, as the saying goes. That’s what McCain did with great courage to survive five-and-a-half years at the Hanoi Hilton. And he made his own luck again by advocating a surge of troops in Iraq that later proved to be successful.

In winning the Republican presidential nomination, however, McCain has mostly been just plain lucky, no thanks to his own fortitude or foresight. Conservatives inadvertently aided him by failing to line up behind a single rival. Mike Huckabee ruined Mitt Romney’s strategy by beating him in Iowa. And Rudy Giuliani helped by pulling out of New Hampshire and fading in Florida, allowing McCain to sneak ahead and win primaries in both states.

Now Democrats are boosting McCain’s chances of winning the presidency by prolonging the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. “They are eating their own,” says Dick Morris, the onetime adviser to the Clintons. The result, for the moment anyway, is that McCain is inching ahead in polls matching him against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

So long as Clinton stays in the race, the bitter divide among Democrats will widen–to McCain’s advantage. And since Clinton still has a chance of winning the nomination, she’s bound to continue her campaign at least through the Pennsylvania primary on April 22 and the Indiana and North Carolina primaries on May 6–and probably until the verdict of Democratic super-delegates becomes clear sometime this summer.

No matter who ultimately wins the nomination, the prospects for electing a Democratic president this fall will have declined. And through no machinations of his own, McCain’s chances of winning will have improved. There’s a name for that happenstance: luck.

Read the whole thing.

Lee Culpepper sees the light, or at least the Wright.

Watching the “Reverend” Jeremiah Wright gesticulate like a horny peacock and spew out ignorance, hatred, and bitterness towards America truly inspired my religious faith. …

I don’t know about you, but I feel liberated now that I realize that my own stupid decisions and selfish actions are no longer my fault. Now that I won’t have to accept responsibility for my thoughts, my words, or my decisions, I am thanking God for creating rich, white people for me to blame all my problems on. I’m also thanking God for justifying my sin whenever I allow myself to think something I shouldn’t about other people — just as Reverend Wright has taught me to do. …

I also realize now that rich, white people are responsible for poor children growing up in single-parent families. I used to think that the irresponsible sexual behavior and lack of commitment between the children’s parents were responsible. But I guarantee these parents feel a lot better knowing their fornication is someone else’s fault. Thanks to the Wright kind of reverend, I now have a totally new respect for sexually immoral people – unless they are rich and white, of course.

Despite the conflicting medical evidence, I now know too that AIDS and drug abuse are rich, white people’s fault. Individual’s who choose to abuse drugs and engage in deviant sexual behavior are merely victims driven to bad decisions by rich, white people. Certainly being a victim of evil people feels better than thinking of one’s self as just a pathetic drug addict or a promiscuous sexual deviant. “Oh, I am so glad” that Reverend Wright worked “twice as hard…to get a passing grade” and that he knows he is “smarter than that C-student sitting in the White House.” Otherwise, I would have never known the truth about drugs and AIDS.

I can’t tell you how relieved I was Tuesday concerning Obama and Wright’s twenty-year relationship. Obama said, “Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms.” Praise the Lord for prepositional phrases like “in my conversations with him.”

When Obama said, “I can no more disown [Wright] than I can disown the black community,” I was glad Obama didn’t actually mean, “If I disowned Reverend Wright because he’s a racist, I would instantly become one of those ‘Negroes who just don’t get it.’”

I finally swooned (actually, I cringed) at Obama’s hopeful audacity when he eloquently humiliated his white grandmother for political gain because “she once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion [had] uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made [Obama] cringe.”

I haven’t figured out, however, how rich, white people caused Obama’s father to abandon his responsibilities as a dad and a husband – thereby forcing someone else to provide for and care for his child. Perhaps Mr. Obama strategically deserted his family so Reverend Wright could preach that Barak “fits the mold” of a poor, black man — even though Obama was raised by his generous and loving white grandparents.

More importantly, I’m just grateful that Barak refocused our country on “the real culprits” related to racial hostilities. Obama targeted “a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed,” as well as “economic policies that favor the few over the many.” Yes, Obama, if America’s evil corporations and economic policies were not preoccupied with causing greater suffering in the world, perhaps they could find time to develop medications to treat AIDS and continuously improve technology to better our lives.

Obama has reminded all of us that we have a choice. We can examine disturbing evidence in order to draw the right conclusions. Or we can simply ignore it and have the audacity to hope it just goes away.