Announcement

**DinoDoc** · March 18, 2008, 01:39

Rasmussen Reports
3/5/2008
N=690
w/o Gore

Hillary Clinton 52%
Barack Obama 37%
Unsure 11%
Source

http://www.presidentpolls2008.com/primary-election-poll-results/pennsylvania-democratic-republican-polls.html

**Kidlicious** · March 18, 2008, 01:43

Originally posted by DinoDoc
Rasmussen Reports
3/5/2008
N=690
w/o Gore

Hillary Clinton 52%
Barack Obama 37%
Unsure 11%
Source

http://www.presidentpolls2008.com/pr...can-polls.html

Dude, that's just PA

**Imran Siddiqui** · March 18, 2008, 08:09

realclearpolitics.com

http://realclearpolitics.com/polls/

Gallup has Clinton up by 2 (47%-45%). Rasmussen has Obama up by 2 (46%-44%).

Interestingly enough as well, Gallup has Clinton beating McCain by 5, but Obama beating McCain by 2. And in 5 day tracking, Clinton and McCain are tied, but McCain is beating Obama by 2.

Gallup Daily: Clinton Now at 47%, Obama at 45%

http://www.gallup.com/poll/105040/Gallup-Daily-Clinton-Now-47-Obama-45.aspx

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama remain roughly tied at 47% vs. 45% in national Democratic preferences, but with a slight edge going to Clinton for the first time in over a week.

**Elok** · March 18, 2008, 08:23

What odds are they giving in Vegas? That's the most accurate prediction, methinks.

**rah** · March 18, 2008, 09:25

We'll see if his speech today to distance himself from his racist pastor/friend has any impact. If he says that those types of comments are common in the black church community and are acceptable there, he will have some problems. If he attacks those positions it may make some of his black supporters question him. (but I doubt it will stop them from voting for him)

That and we'll see if any of the political influence trial of his buddy sticks. He's already made some embarassing admited lack of judgement comments but we'll see if he can leave it at that. And if anyone still believes he's and outsider and pure of heart, they're drinking the koolaid.

**Kidlicious** · March 18, 2008, 11:33

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

realclearpolitics.com

http://realclearpolitics.com/polls/

Gallup has Clinton up by 2 (47%-45%). Rasmussen has Obama up by 2 (46%-44%).

Interestingly enough as well, Gallup has Clinton beating McCain by 5, but Obama beating McCain by 2. And in 5 day tracking, Clinton and McCain are tied, but McCain is beating Obama by 2.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/105040/Ga...-Obama-45.aspx

Did you look at the RCP average? Obama is up in that one too, but not by a significant amount I think.

**Imran Siddiqui** · March 18, 2008, 11:45

Yes, the RCP average takes into account the last 5 polls. The earliest of those 5 was 3/6.

But in those averages, interestingly enough, Clinton beats McCain by 0.6% while McCain beats Obama by 0.4%.

**asleepathewheel** · March 18, 2008, 11:59

Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

1. I thought he said he hadn't heard these remarks directly, only second hand?

2. If my preacher ever said anything close to what was said by his, I would have left and never come back. Granted, I went to a very vanilla methodist church. My grandmother, however, left her church (southern baptist) due to continue harping on such salient issues as Harry Potter and disney-and she was ~70 at the time listening to far less divisive speeches than Wright gave.

I suspect that most Americans agree with me on my second point and find such remarks to be insulting.

**Ramo** · March 18, 2008, 12:02

Obama just addressed the Wright matter, and more importantly race in America. I thought it was a very good, honest speech. Easily, the best one (by any candidate) this campaign.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

“People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.”

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

[...]

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

[...]

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

[...]

There is one story in particularly that I’d like to leave you with today – a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”

“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

**snoopy369** · March 18, 2008, 12:11

Originally posted by asleepathewheel

1. I thought he said he hadn't heard these remarks directly, only second hand?

2. If my preacher ever said anything close to what was said by his, I would have left and never come back. Granted, I went to a very vanilla methodist church. My grandmother, however, left her church (southern baptist) due to continue harping on such salient issues as Harry Potter and disney-and she was ~70 at the time listening to far less divisive speeches than Wright gave.

I suspect that most Americans agree with me on my second point and find such remarks to be insulting.

I think he struck the middle line very effectively, by emphasizing that, had he no past relationship with the pastor, this is absolutely what he would have done; but you don't end a twenty plus year relationship based on one statement, regardless of that statement. I'd certainly agree with that.

**DinoDoc** · March 18, 2008, 12:31

but you don't end a twenty plus year relationship based on one statement, regardless of that statement.

Only 1 statement?

**asleepathewheel** · March 18, 2008, 12:31

Originally posted by snoopy369

I think he struck the middle line very effectively, by emphasizing that, had he no past relationship with the pastor, this is absolutely what he would have done; but you don't end a twenty plus year relationship based on one statement, regardless of that statement. I'd certainly agree with that.

Does anyone actually believe it was just one statement (that Obama was aware of)?

And yes, I would end old relationships over fundamental issues such as these. I have before, though my relationships are obviously much younger due to my own age. The only person I have loyalty to that might survive such racial or divisive tones or anything as crazy as Wright repeatedly said would be my wife.

The fact that Obama was aware of Wright's messages and continued to attend the church (donate money to it?) and support Wright up until he became a political liability flies in the face of his stated desire to not be divisive.

Doesn't it trouble you (plural) Obama supporters that he is only distancing himself from Wright now that their association is a political liability?

**Ramo** · March 18, 2008, 12:46

That's all premised on the idea that Wright regularly peppered his sermons with racial invective. Let's be clear: there are only a few sermons at issue, and there's no evidence that Obama attended them. If Obama is telling the truth in that:

Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect.

... his defense (see above) is perfectly reasonable. If he did regularly hear racist rants, then it's not; but I don't know why we should assume without evidence that's the case. Particularly given his conciliatory rhetoric from the beginning of his career (summarized in this speech), and his upbringing, which are directly at odds with this sort of thing.

**asleepathewheel** · March 18, 2008, 12:50

Originally posted by Ramo
That's all premised on the idea that Wright regularly peppered his sermons with racial invective. Let's be clear: there are only a few sermons at issue, and there's no evidence that Obama attended them. If Obama is telling the truth in that:

... his defense (see above) is perfectly reasonable. If he did regularly hear racist rants, then it's not; but I don't know why we should assume without evidence that's the case. Particularly given his conciliatory rhetoric from the beginning of his career (summarized in this speech), and his upbringing, which are directly at odds with this sort of thing.

Obama Speech Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes.

Announcement

Obama's got 7 points on Hillary +- 4.5

Obama's got 7 points on Hillary +- 4.5

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment