Obama and Race: is there no common standard here?

James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal:

...is there no common standard here? For decades, major institutions--schools, the law, the media--have driven home the message that when it comes to racial bigotry, words matter: that one should strive to overcome one's own prejudices, and at the very least keep them to oneself.

Yet here we have someone in a position of responsibility in the black community--no less than the spiritual mentor to a would-be president--who not only has failed to live up to this aspiration but has made a career of promoting racial resentment. In response we hear a litany of excuses about understandable anger, a tradition of rebellion and so forth. The kindest thing that can be said about this is that it is a form of soft bigotry.

The incendiary hatred of “Whitey” in the black community has never been so boldly exposed as in the Obama/Wright controversy. The defense of Wright and his hate speech is sure proof that he is not an outlier, but appears to be in the mainstream of Black viewpoints regarding race.

A great appeal of Barack Obama's candidacy was, as this column put it in January, that "Obama is black, and it doesn't matter." Bill and Hillary Clinton understood this, which is why they tried to liken him to Jesse Jackson early in the primary season. That effort backfired badly. But now Jeremiah Wright has achieved what the Clintons could not: defining Obama in terms of his race.

"After largely shying away from discussions of race during his 15-month campaign, Sen. Obama turned the spotlight on his identity as a biracial African-American candidate and embraced the idea that he is the vehicle for a dialogue about race," The Wall Street Journal reports. "Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now," Obama said. But as Mickey Kaus notes, "Actually, a lot of voters supported Obama because they'd kind of like to ignore race, you know?"

The issue of race in America is a scab that it appears the Black community cannot avoid picking at. Often in life people hurt us. The best way to get over it is to ignore it until we forget it. To assume a position of being superior to a hurt is often the way to healing. Marriages do not last if one partner continues to raise grievances against the other. The Wright approach to race is deliberately designed to create a gulf between the races.

Obama threw a sop to working class whites in his speech, condescending to them and telling them that they can join him in attacking the “real” enemies of America in an appeal to class warfare.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle-class squeeze--a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.

A uniter, not a divider? Quick, look there, the real enemy!

What he seems to be offering "working- and middle-class white Americans" is to label them "resentful" rather than "misguided or even racist," in exchange for which they are expected to support an expansion of left-liberal social programs. Will this bargain appeal to voters any more than it has in the previous 10 elections?