IX: Obama’s Triumph of the Will: The 2008 Primaries 351sabotage and abort. So Wright used his hour of fame to demand essentially nothing for the most
disadvantaged part of the black community – just like his friend Farrakhan, who had ruined the
success of the Million Man March by giving a raving speech about numerology and occult
freemasonic symbolism instead of laying out a fighting program to rebuild America for all the
people.
Down the road was even more trouble, since Wright was now promising a book to be published
in October 2008, on the eve of the general election. And if there was to be a book, there would also
be a book tour, with innumerable press conferences and press availabilities, and unending
opportunities for Wright to embarrass and sabotage Obama, if he were still in the race at that point.
As soon as the primaries were over, Obama quit Trinity United once and for all. But after 20 years,
it was much too late to neutralize the issue. Obama was clearly a candidate with so many demolition
charges built in that Democrats now had to jettison this fatal baggage before he dragged them down.
TONGUE-TIED: OBAMA’S CATASTROPHIC
PRESS CONFERENCE OF APRIL 29, 2008
April was indeed the cruelest month for Obama. What followed was one of the most bizarre
press conferences in recent American history. This time there was no teleprompter, and for this the
Perfect Master paid a terrible price. No longer was his head thrown back in haughty superiority.
Now his eyes were downcast, his speech halting, his demeanor grim and saturnine, with streaks of
anger. Never had the Perfect Master stuttered, stammered, paused, halted, hiccupped, and gurgled
so much as on this fateful occasion. He said “uuh” a great deal. He drew out the word “and” until it
seemed to have two syllables. Never had the great balcony orator been so tongue-tied. A good index
of the disintegration of Obama’s troubled personality might have been the “y’know index.” As long
as he had read off teleprompters, he had been fluent. As long as he stuck to the pre-masticated
utopian platitudes and messianic clichés of his stock stump speech as written by the Grub Street
scrivener Favreau, he had been reasonably proficient. But now, when he had to extemporize under
fire, and above all to exercise some sort of self-reflexive and self-critical judgment, the words
would not come. Obama was now the waffle candidate, and he proved it by waffling on the Wright
issue. Even with hell gaping below his candidacy, he could not bring himself to break definitively
with the racist provocateur. He was still a member of Wright’s church, and he would not quit that
church unless and until he had conferred with Reverend Otis Moss III, the Ford Foundation scholar
who was now the pastor. Even when Obama’s political survival was at stake, he was a wimp who
could not be decisive.
OBAMA – APOSTATE MOSLEM OR MAHDI?
Many Obama backers tried to create the impression that Obama’s Moslem name would
automatically win him the good will of a billion Moslems around the world. But this may represent
a misconception on the part of handlers like Brzezinski, who is notorious for knowing virtually
nothing of the Islamic world and of many of the parts of the world that he tries so hard to
manipulate and destroy. Would Obama be able to give US imperialism a face lift and a new lease on
life among the Moslems? A veteran neocon warned against the ‘argument that Mr. Obama’s
election would raise America’s esteem in Africa — indeed, he already arouses much enthusiasm in
his father’s native Kenya and to a degree elsewhere on the continent. But it is a mistake to conflate
his African identity with his Muslim heritage. Senator Obama is half African by birth and Africans
can understandably identify with him. In Islam, however, there is no such thing as a half-Muslim.