Michael Gaynor
Obama's reparations policy
By Michael Gaynor
Obama on "Meet the Press," July 27, 2008: "The biggest problem that we have in terms of race relations, I think, is dealing with the legacy of past discrimination which has resulted in extreme disparities in terms of poverty, in terms of wealth and in terms of income. Our inner cities are a legacy of what happened in the past. And the question is less assigning blame or rooting out active racism, because that's not the reason that those inner cities are in such bad shape, but rather figuring out are we willing to make the investments to deal with that past history so we can move forward to a brighter future? And that involves investing in early childhood education, fixing the schools in those communities, being willing to work in terms of job retraining. And those are serious investments."
In 2002, when the reparations crowd used Holy Week "to renew their effort to extort 'reparations' for slavery from their fellow citizens, Ambassador Keyes eloquently and emphatically condemned the timing, the goal and the sophistry.
Ambassador Keyes:
"...lawsuits have been filed. Those responsible propose to settle the accounts of slavery leaving the Civil War out of the equation — complete and utter nonsense. The price for the sin of slavery has already been paid, in blood.
"To answer the reparations question, we must re-awaken a living understanding of the great moral drama played out in blood, treasure and human spirit on the battlefields of America a century and a half ago. President Lincoln stated in the Second Inaugural that, at the beginning of the war, 'slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.'
"Somehow.
"By this simple adverb, Lincoln captures the great question slavery posed to the soul of the nation. The war began in imperfect understanding, and concluded in clear understanding, that it had been caused by national violation of the laws of nature, and of nature's God...."
Ambassador Keyes summed it up smartly and succinctly:
"The moral drama of the Civil War was the nation's discernment, in its agony, that slavery was the cause of the war not as an economic interest, not as a political provocation, but as a sin which must be paid for by the blood of North and South.
"At the heart of Union sentiment was the sense that a precious common good, to which all had legitimate claim, was being denied by the illegitimate refusal of their fellow citizens in the South to accept the verdict of the 1860 election. In its various ways, the North understood that the Union was the attempt of one people to establish the possibility of self-government upon the basis of the equal dignity of all men. And so the North understood that secession in defense of slavery represented the illegitimate bid by the South to replace self-government by equal free men with its elder adversary — the tyrannical rule of the powerful over their weaker brethren.
"In ever increasing numbers and with ever increasing clarity, the soldiers of the North came to understand that the cause of the Union was the cause of liberty for all men. In their letters and diaries, the leavening motive, in the chaos of war, was increasingly the belief that God called them to sacrifice their lives to repair the moral stain of slavery. And over this increasing discernment, President Lincoln exercised wise, and good and patient statesmanship. He saw, and led, a people coming to understand itself and its duty — its vocation unto death and a 'new birth of freedom.'"
Quibblers and connivers, Ambassador Keyes deftly dismissed as ignorant and/or insidious:
"This story is so complicated, and deep, that the venal and superficial among us can continue to deny it. Pseudo-learned scribblers who find contradiction in every prudence, and hypocrisy in every generous concession, continue to offer us their 'real Lincoln' and to deny that Lincoln, or the North, had any real moral purpose. They demonstrate instead only their own incapacity to recognize moral purpose in the genuine complexity of human affairs. The true Lincoln, and the true moral greatness of the Union cause, will continue to tower above their uncomprehending pettiness.
"Our liberty, reborn from the Civil War's labor, remains imperfect — as we must expect of any mortal thing. Pettifogging lawyers and dishonest scholars will always be able to carp selectively and ignorantly about the warts upon our body politic.
"But the truth of the Civil War is that the terrible price for American slavery has been paid, once for all, by the American people's deliberate acceptance of their duty to pay it when, in God's providence, Southern intransigence brought it due."
On Sunday, July 27, 2008, having returned from his carefully choreographed trip to the Middle East and Europe, rookie United States Senator and presumptive 2008 Democrat presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. appeared on "Meet the Press" and answered a question about race by Tom Brokaw in a way that reminds us that all those years with his spiritual mentor, Rev. Jeremiah A. "God damn America" Wright, Jr., proponent of black liberation theology, had a significant effect and the Obama family's decision to leave Trinity United Church of Christ did not represent an abandonment of the agenda of that institution.
Obama on "Meet the Press," July 27, 2008: "The biggest problem that we have in terms of race relations, I think, is dealing with the legacy of past discrimination which has resulted in extreme disparities in terms of poverty, in terms of wealth and in terms of income. Our inner cities are a legacy of what happened in the past. And the question is less assigning blame or rooting out active racism, because that's not the reason that those inner cities are in such bad shape, but rather figuring out are we willing to make the investments to deal with that past history so we can move forward to a brighter future? And that involves investing in early childhood education, fixing the schools in those communities, being willing to work in terms of job retraining. And those are serious investments."
Is "serious investments" code for "reparations"?
And how expensive and devastating would Obama's income redistribution policy be.
Apparently the editors of National Review focused more on a McCain interview that weekend than the Obama interview on "Meet the Press."
The Editors praised McCain's opposition to racial preference, which was well deserved, but envisioned Obama adopting that position too, which would be one too many flip flops for the Kerry protege.
The Editors:
"In an interview with George Stephanopoulos over the weekend, John McCain said that he supports the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative. This is a big deal, and Sen. McCain is to be roundly congratulated.
"The AzCRI is a ballot initiative that will be voted on this fall by the people of Arizona, and would ban preferences based on race, ethnicity, and sex in the state's public contracting, education (including university admissions), and employment programs. It contains the same language that will be before voters on the same day in Colorado and Nebraska, too, and that has already been enacted in California, Washington, and — most recently — Michigan.
"If Sen. McCain is trying to show conservatives that he is one of us, on this issue, at least, he has succeeded. But our considerations ought to be broader than that: The principle of e pluribus unum is vital to all Americans across the political spectrum.
"McCain's commitment is not only sound on principle, but it is wise politics, in both the high and low meanings of the term. In an America that is increasingly multiethnic and multiracial — indeed, in a country where individual Americans are themselves more and more likely to be multiethnic and multiracial — we cannot have a legal regime that sorts people according to skin color and national origin.
"And, overwhelmingly, American voters recognize this.
"Yet Sen. McCain's statement is paradoxically one that also required courage on his part, for the media and entrenched interest groups are likely to attack him for 'playing the race card.' As bizarre as it seems, it will be denounced as divisive to oppose racial divisions. So we applaud McCain's courage as well."
Amen! And bravo to those unbigoted voters, McCain and the Editors.
But then the Editors succumbed to the wishful thinking temptation and gave Obama too much credit for intellectual integrity.
The Editors:
"We have a divergence of interest with McCain, however, in one respect: While it might be to McCain's advantage for Barack Obama to insist on continuing his own opposition to these ballot initiatives and his support for racial preferences, we hope for the good of the country he will not do so. And we hope this is not the pipe dream it might appear to be.
"Obama, after all, himself recognized the divisiveness of preferential treatment in his Philadelphia race speech earlier this year. And a little over a year ago, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos, he acknowledged that his own daughters, for starters, come from privileged backgrounds and thus are 'probably' not deserving of preferential treatment. Once upon a time, there was hope that Sen. Obama would be a race-transcending candidate who would bring us all together — not just another Democratic pol who lacks the courage to stand up to powerful but aging interests in his own party.
"If Sen. Obama were to take a deep breath and acknowledge that, yes, the logic of his own past pronouncements means that the time has come, at long last, to end racial preferences, it would be good for him and his campaign — and a great thing for the nation."
The Editors apparently think that Michelle Obama's pledge in her college thesis to put the Black community "first and foremost" is (in the words of Ron Ziegler) "no longer operative."
I don't.
Let's be realistic: when Rev. Wright said that Obama will say what he needs to say as a politician, Rev. Wright was right (and Obama officially cut ties to him for telling the truth, not for his outrageous, racist, un-American distribes).
The "real" Obama is the one who was caught on tape denouncing rural Americans for clinging to religion and guns as a result of economic circumstance, not the man he professes in public to be.
Obama's wife finally became proud of America because the Obama presidential campaign was well received.
Both of them are hoping no one produces a tape of Obama's conversations with his favorite Kenyan politician, Raila Odinga, before Election Day 2008, when they met in Kenyan and America and when they talked by telephone.
Young people who learn that Odinga was educated in Germany often fail to realize he was educated in Communist East Germany before reunification and they don't realize that Odinga, in naming his firstborn "Fidel," signaled his radical political views that endear him to Obama.
Obama versus an authentic American war hero (McCain).
That's proof that Obama learned about the audacity of hope from Rev. Wright.
© Michael Gaynor
Obama on "Meet the Press," July 27, 2008: "The biggest problem that we have in terms of race relations, I think, is dealing with the legacy of past discrimination which has resulted in extreme disparities in terms of poverty, in terms of wealth and in terms of income. Our inner cities are a legacy of what happened in the past. And the question is less assigning blame or rooting out active racism, because that's not the reason that those inner cities are in such bad shape, but rather figuring out are we willing to make the investments to deal with that past history so we can move forward to a brighter future? And that involves investing in early childhood education, fixing the schools in those communities, being willing to work in terms of job retraining. And those are serious investments."
In 2002, when the reparations crowd used Holy Week "to renew their effort to extort 'reparations' for slavery from their fellow citizens, Ambassador Keyes eloquently and emphatically condemned the timing, the goal and the sophistry.
Ambassador Keyes:
"...lawsuits have been filed. Those responsible propose to settle the accounts of slavery leaving the Civil War out of the equation — complete and utter nonsense. The price for the sin of slavery has already been paid, in blood.
"To answer the reparations question, we must re-awaken a living understanding of the great moral drama played out in blood, treasure and human spirit on the battlefields of America a century and a half ago. President Lincoln stated in the Second Inaugural that, at the beginning of the war, 'slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.'
"Somehow.
"By this simple adverb, Lincoln captures the great question slavery posed to the soul of the nation. The war began in imperfect understanding, and concluded in clear understanding, that it had been caused by national violation of the laws of nature, and of nature's God...."
Ambassador Keyes summed it up smartly and succinctly:
"The moral drama of the Civil War was the nation's discernment, in its agony, that slavery was the cause of the war not as an economic interest, not as a political provocation, but as a sin which must be paid for by the blood of North and South.
"At the heart of Union sentiment was the sense that a precious common good, to which all had legitimate claim, was being denied by the illegitimate refusal of their fellow citizens in the South to accept the verdict of the 1860 election. In its various ways, the North understood that the Union was the attempt of one people to establish the possibility of self-government upon the basis of the equal dignity of all men. And so the North understood that secession in defense of slavery represented the illegitimate bid by the South to replace self-government by equal free men with its elder adversary — the tyrannical rule of the powerful over their weaker brethren.
"In ever increasing numbers and with ever increasing clarity, the soldiers of the North came to understand that the cause of the Union was the cause of liberty for all men. In their letters and diaries, the leavening motive, in the chaos of war, was increasingly the belief that God called them to sacrifice their lives to repair the moral stain of slavery. And over this increasing discernment, President Lincoln exercised wise, and good and patient statesmanship. He saw, and led, a people coming to understand itself and its duty — its vocation unto death and a 'new birth of freedom.'"
Quibblers and connivers, Ambassador Keyes deftly dismissed as ignorant and/or insidious:
"This story is so complicated, and deep, that the venal and superficial among us can continue to deny it. Pseudo-learned scribblers who find contradiction in every prudence, and hypocrisy in every generous concession, continue to offer us their 'real Lincoln' and to deny that Lincoln, or the North, had any real moral purpose. They demonstrate instead only their own incapacity to recognize moral purpose in the genuine complexity of human affairs. The true Lincoln, and the true moral greatness of the Union cause, will continue to tower above their uncomprehending pettiness.
"Our liberty, reborn from the Civil War's labor, remains imperfect — as we must expect of any mortal thing. Pettifogging lawyers and dishonest scholars will always be able to carp selectively and ignorantly about the warts upon our body politic.
"But the truth of the Civil War is that the terrible price for American slavery has been paid, once for all, by the American people's deliberate acceptance of their duty to pay it when, in God's providence, Southern intransigence brought it due."
On Sunday, July 27, 2008, having returned from his carefully choreographed trip to the Middle East and Europe, rookie United States Senator and presumptive 2008 Democrat presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. appeared on "Meet the Press" and answered a question about race by Tom Brokaw in a way that reminds us that all those years with his spiritual mentor, Rev. Jeremiah A. "God damn America" Wright, Jr., proponent of black liberation theology, had a significant effect and the Obama family's decision to leave Trinity United Church of Christ did not represent an abandonment of the agenda of that institution.
Obama on "Meet the Press," July 27, 2008: "The biggest problem that we have in terms of race relations, I think, is dealing with the legacy of past discrimination which has resulted in extreme disparities in terms of poverty, in terms of wealth and in terms of income. Our inner cities are a legacy of what happened in the past. And the question is less assigning blame or rooting out active racism, because that's not the reason that those inner cities are in such bad shape, but rather figuring out are we willing to make the investments to deal with that past history so we can move forward to a brighter future? And that involves investing in early childhood education, fixing the schools in those communities, being willing to work in terms of job retraining. And those are serious investments."
Is "serious investments" code for "reparations"?
And how expensive and devastating would Obama's income redistribution policy be.
Apparently the editors of National Review focused more on a McCain interview that weekend than the Obama interview on "Meet the Press."
The Editors praised McCain's opposition to racial preference, which was well deserved, but envisioned Obama adopting that position too, which would be one too many flip flops for the Kerry protege.
The Editors:
"In an interview with George Stephanopoulos over the weekend, John McCain said that he supports the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative. This is a big deal, and Sen. McCain is to be roundly congratulated.
"The AzCRI is a ballot initiative that will be voted on this fall by the people of Arizona, and would ban preferences based on race, ethnicity, and sex in the state's public contracting, education (including university admissions), and employment programs. It contains the same language that will be before voters on the same day in Colorado and Nebraska, too, and that has already been enacted in California, Washington, and — most recently — Michigan.
"If Sen. McCain is trying to show conservatives that he is one of us, on this issue, at least, he has succeeded. But our considerations ought to be broader than that: The principle of e pluribus unum is vital to all Americans across the political spectrum.
"McCain's commitment is not only sound on principle, but it is wise politics, in both the high and low meanings of the term. In an America that is increasingly multiethnic and multiracial — indeed, in a country where individual Americans are themselves more and more likely to be multiethnic and multiracial — we cannot have a legal regime that sorts people according to skin color and national origin.
"And, overwhelmingly, American voters recognize this.
"Yet Sen. McCain's statement is paradoxically one that also required courage on his part, for the media and entrenched interest groups are likely to attack him for 'playing the race card.' As bizarre as it seems, it will be denounced as divisive to oppose racial divisions. So we applaud McCain's courage as well."
Amen! And bravo to those unbigoted voters, McCain and the Editors.
But then the Editors succumbed to the wishful thinking temptation and gave Obama too much credit for intellectual integrity.
The Editors:
"We have a divergence of interest with McCain, however, in one respect: While it might be to McCain's advantage for Barack Obama to insist on continuing his own opposition to these ballot initiatives and his support for racial preferences, we hope for the good of the country he will not do so. And we hope this is not the pipe dream it might appear to be.
"Obama, after all, himself recognized the divisiveness of preferential treatment in his Philadelphia race speech earlier this year. And a little over a year ago, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos, he acknowledged that his own daughters, for starters, come from privileged backgrounds and thus are 'probably' not deserving of preferential treatment. Once upon a time, there was hope that Sen. Obama would be a race-transcending candidate who would bring us all together — not just another Democratic pol who lacks the courage to stand up to powerful but aging interests in his own party.
"If Sen. Obama were to take a deep breath and acknowledge that, yes, the logic of his own past pronouncements means that the time has come, at long last, to end racial preferences, it would be good for him and his campaign — and a great thing for the nation."
The Editors apparently think that Michelle Obama's pledge in her college thesis to put the Black community "first and foremost" is (in the words of Ron Ziegler) "no longer operative."
I don't.
Let's be realistic: when Rev. Wright said that Obama will say what he needs to say as a politician, Rev. Wright was right (and Obama officially cut ties to him for telling the truth, not for his outrageous, racist, un-American distribes).
The "real" Obama is the one who was caught on tape denouncing rural Americans for clinging to religion and guns as a result of economic circumstance, not the man he professes in public to be.
Obama's wife finally became proud of America because the Obama presidential campaign was well received.
Both of them are hoping no one produces a tape of Obama's conversations with his favorite Kenyan politician, Raila Odinga, before Election Day 2008, when they met in Kenyan and America and when they talked by telephone.
Young people who learn that Odinga was educated in Germany often fail to realize he was educated in Communist East Germany before reunification and they don't realize that Odinga, in naming his firstborn "Fidel," signaled his radical political views that endear him to Obama.
Obama versus an authentic American war hero (McCain).
That's proof that Obama learned about the audacity of hope from Rev. Wright.
© Michael Gaynor
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(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
