Obama Marginalizes the Left, Necessarily

Rowan Berkeley has posted the Rev. Wright speech at the Detroit NAACP last weekend and challenged people to listen to what the man is saying. I imagine I will some day, and probably agree with a lot of what Wright is saying, but of course Wright is radioactive in the discourse now, and it is interesting to consider the process of political marginalization that is now taking place with Obama and the left. As I say again and again, Obama is a man of the left, it’s what he comes out of, it’s the subtext of his first book, and the text of his mother’s life and of his wife’s Princeton thesis. Now he is for political reasons cutting off portions of the left, tossing them under the bus. He has been doing so for years; and we stick with him because of course we have nowhere else to go.  The question is, Should I be sore about this, or care? And I find that I’m indifferent. It seems to me a necessary process, even if I am part of the world that is being publicly distanced. I am like Wright in that respect: I wink and say, Obama has to say this, I know his heart. What I count on Obama to do, and what Brzezinski and Obama’s army also count on him to do, is move the discourse left. I imagine Reagan committed the same sort of ideological murders when he was trying to capture the center. Only purists howl.

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