Are We Getting Two for One?Is Michelle Obama responsible for the Jeremiah Wright fiasco?

Some distrurbing thoughts from Hitchins on Michelle Obama.

Liberal comment on Wright, and on the incredible damage that this conceited old fanatic has done to the Obama campaign, tends to dwell on the negative effect that black chauvinist rhetoric has on white working-class voters. Fair enough, I suppose. But why should a thinking black member of the working class want any truck with a Farrakhan fan or with a moral idiot who thinks that the drugs and disease in the black community are imposed by an outside conspiracy? I don't need any condescending liberal to explain to me why black Americans are inclined to be touchy about the way their forebears were treated any more than I require a patronizing former Harvard law student to guide me through the anxieties of the gun-owning and hunting community. I can quite easily understand these points without pedagogic assistance. What I won't be told is that Tawana Brawley was right, or that AIDS is the fault of the government, or that Jews were behind the slave trade, or that there is a secret Masonic code in the dollar bill. And the apologist for murder "Minister Farrakhan" and his big-mouth Christian friends flirt with this kind of half-baked garbage every day.
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What can it be that has kept Obama in Wright's pews, and at Wright's mercy, for so long and at such a heavy cost to his aspirations? ...

This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it. (One can picture Obama looking pained and sensitive and saying, "Keep my wife out of it," or words to that effect, as Clinton tried to do in 1992 when Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader quite correctly inquired about his spouse's influence.) If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company—and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable—then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.

I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama's 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be "read" at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language. Anyway, at quite an early stage in the text, Michelle Obama announces that she's much influenced by the definition of black "separationism" offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 screed Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. I remember poor Stokely Carmichael quite well. After a hideous series of political and personal fiascos, he fled to Africa, renamed himself Kwame Toure after two of West Africa's most repellently failed dictators, and then came briefly back to the United States before electing to die in exile. I last saw him as the warm-up speaker for Louis Farrakhan in Madison Square Garden in 1985, on the evening when Farrakhan made himself famous by warning Jews, "You can't say 'Never Again' to God, because when he puts you in the ovens, you're there forever." I have the distinct feeling that the Obama campaign can't go on much longer without an answer to the question: "Are we getting two for one?" And don't be giving me any grief about asking this. Black Americans used to think that the Clinton twosome was their best friend, too. This time we should find out before it's too late to ask.