You May Be Wright, I May Be Crazy...

Back in 2005, the Terry Schiavo case garnered wall-to-wall coverage, with all major news networks showing the same footage of a moribund woman in a vegetative state seemingly looking at her husband while photogs and other hospital room intruders greedily snapped their camera shutters. Schiavo, as I'm sure you probably recall, suffered brain damage as a result of cardiac arrest back in 1990. The long periods of time she spent without oxygen caused severe and irreversible brain damage, and Mrs. Schiavo was fitted with a feeding tube to keep her alive while doctors worked tirelessly to find a cure. In 1993, Mrs. Schiavo's husband, Michael, entered a "Do Not Resussitate" injunction into her will based on the testimony of Mrs. Schiavo's doctor who claimed that her hope for recovery was almost nil. Twelve years passed, and Terry Schiavo, after being at the center of multiple court cases, was no closer to being cured than she was when she was first institutionalized. The legal battles between Mr. Schiavo, who desperately wanted his wife's hospitalization to end, and Mrs. Schiavo's parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, who claimed that their daughter could feel pain and should be kept alive, continued. In 2003, Florida passed Terry's Law which gave the State government the ability to intervene as a quasi-in loco parentis. Suddenly, the Schindlers and their right-to-life supporters were thrusted into the middle of a national debate with Mr. Schiavo and those who believed Terry Schiavo's feeding tube should be removed. Sure, the pain of one family could be put on display for America to discuss over their dinner tables, but the right of this person to have her feeding tube removed, as was stated in her will, was disallowed by an "pro-life" governor whose only interest in the case was his political career. Soon, the case sparked Federal interventions, through the Palm Sunday Compromise, and the raging right-to-life versus right-to-die debate exploded throughout the media. Almost exactly three years later, Barack Obama currently finds himself in a Schiavo-esque situation: he and his supporters continue to disavow any political or idealogical connection to the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and hope that the story dies while his detractors and the media force feed it down our throats like a feeding tube inside someone who barely realizes its presence hoping beyond hope that some feeling is evoked.

The problem with Rev. Jeremiah Wright is not his belief in America's lousy foreign policy being the cause for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, for if that were the case, Republicans would have denounced Ron Paul a while ago. It is not his unabashed promotion of a vengeful and angry God, for if that were the case, John McCain would not have sought the endorsement of a figure even more polarizing than Hillary Clinton. I'm referring, of course, to Pastor John Hagee. Why the Jeremiah Wright story is so powerful is because America clings to the notion that angry, black men sell. Americans want to see black men angry at their "white oppressors" and act out in a manner that gives credence to stereotypes and cuts short the notion of civic and civil progress. It is the media's continual harping on a story that has absolutely nothing to do with politics and everything to do with a poor judge of character. Twenty years ago, Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, were married by a priest whose controversial rhetoric, while not hateful, inspired Mr. Obama to not only become a Christian, but run for public office. Using titles of sermons from which he, himself, drew strength - "The Audacity of Hope" being of the most notable - Mr. Obama won a senate seat in 2004 and used that to propel himself to the national level of politics. His bipartisan and transcendentally inspirational messages of hope, change, and improvement have not only emboldened millions of people to take ownership in their communities and to take part in politics, but they have encouraged and empowered people to believe in the future once more; to believe in America. Now, because of the attention paid to this story, and not to the issues that truly matter, Barack Obama is getting caught up in the old school politics of the twentieth century, and is playing right into the Republican machine and the Clintonian Democrats.

Hillary Clinton threw fuel on this fire, and now that it is raging and threatening to cause a foundational collapse in the Obama campaign, is calling on the same media who originally picked up on her comments to focus on the issues she had wanted to muck in the first place. This is the same person who questions Mr. Obama's judgment, for how dare he align himself with such an anti-American and divisive figure? Shouldn't he have known better? Perhaps he should have. Maybe a younger Barack Obama, upon knowing that he would run for president, should have realized that Rev. Wright's animated style would not play in America's sticks and he should have distanced himself from his family pastor from the beginning. What concerns me is the fact that absolutely no one has brought up the fact that maybe Hillary Clinton should have had the foresight to know that her husband was a philandering womanizer. Why should her poor spousal judgment be considered taboo while Obama's religious affiliation is continually called into question? What makes one person's poor judgment less valid than another's? Similarly, why has no one paid attention to the political craftiness of Hillary Clinton's latest story about George Bush supposedly allowing the outsourcing of Indiana jobs to China when it was, in fact, her husband who signed the 1995 bill. Where is the Democratic outrage when Hillary Clinton, a supposed liberal spender, and John McCain, a fiscal conservative, support the suspension of a national gas tax that will save Americans a whopping $30 this summer? The problem is that the cameras are all away, focused on America's newest angry black man, hoping that he says something else inflammatory to distract people from the real issues.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright is not going to end the Iraq War with a speech about God. Rev. Jeremiah Wright is not going to turn this country's economy around and make America the economic powerhouse it once was by making remarks about the white devil. Rev. Jeremiah Wright is not going to assure that all Americans have health care by talking about state-sponsored terrorism. America, stop pressing the snooze button on your alarm clocks and wake up! Barack Obama, the voice of hope, reason, and a better future, is being dragged down by partisan politics and the noise being made by a pastor whose fifteen seconds of fame have almost expired. Listen to the message of the man and not the self-aggrandizement of a person whose inflammatory remarks are made just to be made. This election is about the issues, it's about change, it's about real leadership in Washington... don't let that ideal become just another casualty of hope.