Sen. Hillary Clinton would have long ago distanced herself from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright if she had been a member of his church, the Democratic presidential candidate said Tuesday.
It's the first time she or her campaign has commented directly on a controversy that has swirled around rival Sen. Barack Obama's campaign in recent weeks.
"I think given all we have heard and seen, he would not have been my pastor," Clinton said in a news conference in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
I think this sort of comment is, in a nutshell, just about everything that's wrong with politics. She's referencing and making a "judgement" (which carries absolutely no real life consequences) about what she would have done, and posturing in such a meaningless way for nothing but political gain. It's meaningless, shameless, unadulterated pandering. It's like someone saying if they were married to President Clinton, they would have treated him better so he wouldn't have strayed into adultery. It's taking an intensely personal, complex matter and reducing it to the point of parody, making a farcical judgment based on that reduction, and claiming to be morally superior for doing so.Really, it just makes me mad.
4 comments:
For me there's another point to it.
I actually respect Obama for not disowning the guy. We all know other Christians who have some beliefs we'd disavow, but we don't break fellowship with them over it.
And I don't doubt Clinton would have distanced herself because she would have been doing the political calculation.
You and me both. He talks about the man the way one would talk about a father, not just some guy.
For me, that disarms the "you choose your pastor, not your family" criticism of the comparison between his pastor and his grandmother. In a real sense, I think Obama regards his pastor as family.
Devotion that comes with a price is nothing to be dismissed as casually as Clinton does in these comments.
Good for y'all. I was beginning to wonder if there was some weird Christian thing about not having political disagreements with the clergy.
And now at the end, Obama ends up doing the same sort of thing. I respected him for standing by the guy, but when he then chooses to change his stance once the heat turned up... that just seems too predictable and by-the-book.
Clinton's negative points go down much in my reckoning, but Obama's fall to pretty much the same spot.
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