As skeptical as he is, Strock should take a fresh look at Obama and his campaign

By my count Carl Strock has written three columns about Sen. Barcak Obama’s relationship to his former pastor, and its supposed relevance to the current presidential campaign [March 20, April 6 and May 1 Gazette].

Well, before Mr. Strock’s first column on this matter, Sen. Obama had already fully disassociated himself from his former pastor’s excessive and radical remarks on race. The senator had also made an insightful speech in Philadelphia on race relations in America, which I hope will have an enduring place in our nation’s great statements on democracy. Sen. Obama’s campaign itself had been an uplifting and welcome relief from other divisive and negative campaigns. Mr. Strock, however, a self-avowed “skeptic,” chose to harp on the pastor’s outrageous remarks which the senator had already denounced, dismissing the senator’s disavowal and discounting his remarkable and thoughtful speech on race relations and the uplifting tenor of the senator’s campaign.

Unfortunately, in my view, the Rev. Wright has now attempted to defend himself in an interview on public television by Bill Moyers and subsequently in televised speeches to the NAACP and to a hastily arranged National Press Club gathering. Pastor Wright’s stance in these appearances became increasingly defensive and self-serving at Sen. Obama’s expense. Consequently, the senator has had to distance himself even further and more forcefully from his former pastor.

This second disavowal does not prove that Mr. Strock was right, as he seems to suppose, in his previous denunciations of the pastor and of the senator’s candidacy because he had not long ago withdrawn his membership from his church. Mr. Strock’s latest column on May 1 sounds to me as defensive and self-serving as the pastor’s recent interview and speeches. Mr. Strock, however, does seem to be taking several steps back from his earlier dismissal of Sen. Obama’s candidacy, stating that the senator “finally said what he should have said in the first place.”

In my opinion, Sen. Obama’s church affiliation and his relationship to his former pastor do not even come close to being the major issue Mr. Strock and others have tried to make of it; and in pursuing it so relentlessly, irrelevant as it is, they may have given any bigots who may decide to vote against Sen. Obama a respectable cloak with which to conceal their real motives.

In any case, Mr. Strock, in the course of his argument, has proceeded to cast all viewers of Bill Moyers’ programs as “gullible.” Even more outrageously, he classes those who may agree with the Rev. Wright’s view that our nation’s past legalization of slavery can still have a profound and destructive effect on blacks today as a “guilt-ridden white liberal variety” of “homo sapiens” that finds “black invective bracing, much as a sexual masochist must find the attentions of a dominatrix bracing.”

This comment and others are, in my view, just as outrageous and racist as some of the comments of the Rev. Wright. Mr. Strock also fulminates against Riverside Church in New York City and those who attend it and those who read The Nation magazine! I think Mr. Strock should calm down, take a deep breath, take a fresh look at the presidential campaign and at last put the non-issue of Pastor Wright and Sen. Obama’s church affiliation aside. Perhaps now he will. I hope so; but I am skeptical of this skeptical columnist.

Wendell Elmendorf

Hagaman