I’ve been thinking about Barack Obama’s decision more than tweny years ago to join the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. It was a calculated decision by this outsider, Ivy League graduate to connect with the inner city community that he saw as his base as he planned a career in the helping industry, er, public life.
Here’s liberal Matthew Yglesias of The Atlantic making the case,
…Obama’s going to have a hard time explaining that I take to be the truth, namely that his relationship with Trinity has been a bit cynical from the beginning. After all, before Obama was a half-black guy running in a mostly white country he was a half-white guy running in a mostly black neighborhood. At that time, associating with a very large, influential, local church with black nationalist overtones was a clear political asset (it’s also clear in his book that it made him, personally, feel “blacker” to belong to a slightly kitschy black church).
This decision, made years ago to help further Obama’s career has come back to cost him dearly. This speech he is being forced to give today “on race” is exactly what he has been trying to avoid for the entire campaign.
There is a real irony here in that the Democrats last nominee, John Kerry, was also denied his ultimate goal because of a cynical, calculated decision he made years earlier. Kerry’s was not a controversial religious affiliation, but his decision to return home from Vietnam and become a leader of the radical wing of the anti-war movement. It was his words, actions and associations in the early 1970’s that cost John Kerry the presidency.
The question today for Barack Obama is, will a cynical, calculated decision he made years ago cost him his shot at the presidency?