Right Voices

The WSJ says that Obama May Not Have Fully Contained Damage From Ex-Pastor, and I tend to agree with that. Obama may have jumped back up in the polls, but we need to keep an eye on the areas that he he needs:

Sen. Barack Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race relations last month seemed to put the controversial remarks of his former pastor behind him. But three weeks later, there is evidence of lingering damage.
“It has not been defused,” says David Parker, a North Carolina Democratic Party official and unpledged superdelegate. He says his worries about Republicans questioning Sen. Obama’s patriotism prompted him to raise the issue of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.’s remarks in conversations with both the Obama and Clinton campaigns. :
Recent polls suggest that, in key swing states, the New York senator fares better in head-to-head matchups with Republican nominee Sen. John McCain than does Sen. Obama. In Ohio, Sen. Clinton led Sen. McCain 48% to 39%, while Sen. Obama led Sen. McCain 43% to 42% in Quinnipiac University polls conducted in the last week of March.
In Pennsylvania, Sen. Clinton had a 48% to 40% lead against Sen. McCain while Sen. Obama was ahead 43% to 39%. The polls credit Sen. Clinton’s advantage to her strength among white voters. No Democrat has won the presidency with a majority of white voters since 1964, and no president from either party has been elected without winning two of the three swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida since 1960. In those three states, some 23% of white Democrats would defect to Sen. McCain in a matchup with Sen. Obama, compared with 11% who would abandon Sen. Clinton, according to the Quinnipiac polls.

The general election should prove to be interesting if Obama is selected as the nominee.

Ed and Jeralyn have more on that.

Now turn to the article; Dialogue on race could begin on hallowed ground, about the damage from the words Reverend Wright spoke:

Is this a great country or what? Yet while he relaxes, the rest of us are asked to have another national dialogue on race? I don’t know about you, but my ears hurt.

Actually, we don’t talk about race. Instead, we talk about talking about race, which is easy. TV does it best. Slap an angry Wright up on the screen and a reasonable Obama, and then go find some tape of an angry white guy and you’re home for supper.

But if we really talked about race, we’d really talk about unfair racial preferences in college and graduate school admissions, in hiring and on tax-subsidized public contracts. We’d talk about the horrendous drop-out rate in big city high school systems run by political bosses who, year after year after year, use minority school children as cash cows to cement their power.

It’s been so corrosive for so long, black resentment over white bigotry and white resentment over racial preferences (which is, in effect, institutionalized racism); and the abandonment of minority schools, generation after generation dropping out, left behind.

We can’t talk about it. It gets too loud and too angry too fast.
But I know a quiet place, where you can think about race and sacrifice. It’s not an angry place now. It’s sacred.

Gettysburg, Pa.
At Gettysburg, most folks don’t talk much. They’re quiet. They listen. It is the site of the famous battle of the Civil War. It began July 1, 1863, and lasted three days. When it was done, some 23,000 Union troops died in trying to break the South. Even more Confederates died.

We drove to Gettysburg last year and toured killing grounds with names like Little Round Top, the Peach Orchard, Devil’s Den, the Wheatfield, slaughter beyond imagining.

One aspect isn’t mentioned often. It involves the farm hogs that went wild and hunted the battlefields at night, hungry for the dead and dying soldiers.

One such story belongs to Lt. Berzila J. Inman of the 118th Pennsylvania Infantry. He was wounded, and his account was chronicled in “Early Photography at Gettysburg” by William Frassanito, published by Thomas Publications.

“That night a number of stray hogs came to where I lay and commenced rooting and tearing at the dead men around me . . . one that looked of enormous size approached and attempted to poke me”grunting loudly all the while. Several others came up, when, waiting on my chance, I jammed my sword into his belly, which made him set up a prolonged, sharp cry. By constant vigilance and keeping from sleeping I contrived to fight the monsters off until daylight.”

So the next group of politicians demanding a sacred dialogue on race should just drive to Gettysburg. They can think of all those souls, fighting to hold the Union and stop slavery, and all those who died defending the South and its slaveholding ways.

It didn’t end there. The hatefulness continued for years, and still does, and shamefully.

But at least you can have a dialogue, a quiet one, a sacred one, alone, a dialogue with yourself, without politics, looking out where thousands upon thousands of Americans died, bringing freedom to others.

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