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On September 16, 2001, I was driving through Chicago with my wife. We were on our way back from visiting family in Wisconsin for a week. Obviously, this vacation was more than marred by the events of 9-11. As we drove through a toll booth outside of the city, I was struck by what I saw on the electronic signs. They said simply, “God Bless America.” There was very little traffic that day, in part because of the fact that it was late on a Sunday morning, but much more because of the horrors that had occurred just days before. A Major League Baseball game I was supposed to attend the day before had been canceled. The NFL games scheduled for that week had also been canceled. It was as if the whole world had stopped. The country was shocked, and it was united. Bitter congressional rivals stood outside the Capitol Building, singing “God Bless America.” Little did I know at the time, that just a few short miles from where I sat marveling at how the country seemed to be of one mind, Rev. Jeremiah Wright was delivering this message to his congregation at Trinity United Church of Christ:

We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.

Of course we all know that Wright has become significant now because he has been Barack Obama’s pastor for 20 years, marrying Obama and his wife Michelle and baptizing their children. Wright was also an adviser to Obama until this story broke. Now Obama has distanced himself from Wright and denounced these statements and others that have been well documented.

From the passage above, you can see that Wright found it prudent to blame America for 9-11, even as the towers smoldered and rescue workers searched for survivors among the thousands of casualties. What you don’t get from that passage is the bitter anger and hatred in this man’s voice. I think it’s Wright’s tone that will end up hurting Obama even more than his actual words. This man has clearly been spewing hatred for America and for whites for decades, and his tone and words will be echoing in the ears of many white voters in this Democratic primary and the general election if Obama is the nominee.

It seemed like Obama was well on his way to overcoming the biggest obstacle that any minority presidential candidate faces: convincing the majority of Americans that he speaks for them and not just the grievances of his minority constituents. That’s why Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton could never be serious presidential candidates. Obama’s tone has been different. He’s been open and conciliatory and seemingly genuinely so. Now his opponents (and more importantly their surrogates) have the opportunity to paint him with the hateful brush of his former pastor’s words.

In his recent speech on the matter, I think Obama really pegged Wright’s rhetoric perfectly:

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.

Those are powerful words, but will they drown out the hate speech of Jeremiah Wright in the minds of voters? I doubt it.

Tags: Federal Officials, MisterF, Presidential Politics //