Far from my field expertise for me to be talking about presidential politics.
But I find the current uproar over Democratic candidate Barak Obama and his (now former) spiritual leader, Pastor Wright to be very compelling.
If I may suggest, I think it is a good thing for the Barak campaign.
First, be it in sports, business, politics or most forms of life, the people who are on top are always the ones in the center of the target for their opponents. Sometimes those opponents turn out to be the one’s who know them the longest or the best.
How many crimes are committed against people by people who know them.
If your name is Barak Obama or the New York Yankees, get used to it, everyone’s going to be slinging negative your way.
The Obama camp, to its credit, disavowed its connection to Pastor Wright. But for the Obama camp, this should be looked at as a blessing.
If Obama was some last-place also ran like Al Sharpton,  nobody would care what his pastor said or for that matter what anyone else said. But the point is, he’s on top right now, and his campaign should maturely expect this sort of stuff. They should be surprised that it didn’t surface sooner. And who knows what could be next as we move closer to the Democratic convention.
Secondly, how Obama handles the Wright situation could tell us a great deal about what sort of president he might be. In a matter of months, he could be dealing with powerful people who have their finger on the trigger of nuclear weapons. If he can’t handle his pastor, how is he going to stand toe-to-toe with Putin and Achmadinijad and all of those wonderful stand-up guys the world has to offer?
Meanwhile, we’ve got gasoline prices that are threatening the core of a family’s income. We’ve got grocery prices that are escalating.
It’s not just about the gap between the rich and the poor rising, it’s the gap between the poor and those who can barely subsist that is now at issue.
Social workers would often say that if a poor person’s car broke down, the repair costs could financially disable a family. Now, we’re entering a time when the cost of filling a gas tank could disable that family.
And it’s not just some stereotypic version of a family you might have in mind. It could be you. It could be me. It could be your neighbor in zipcodes that read 21208 or 21117.
I’m sure the Associated, Ahavas Yisroel, JFS and other organizations dealing with the poor are taking a hard, long look at what is going on here.
So, let’s work on figuring out the strategies of our political candidates on how they will handle this economy, the future of fuel and food in this country and world.
There is not a black price for gasoline and a white price for gasoline that I know of. And there’s not a black price for a loaf of bread at the store and a white price for a loaf of bread. We’re paying the same prices, and Obama, no matter who officiated his marriage, if elected represents all Americans.
So while Pastor Wright gets his 15 minutes of fame, let him have it even though his timing was pretty suspect. If Barak Obama was running for president of the black United States like Al Sharpton seems to have done, then that one be one thing. And it would be the same “thing” that we experienced when the late Alabama governor and reknown racist George Wallace was running for president ostensibly of white America.
We’ve got to elect a president who is going to lead blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians and all sorts of Americans in a world that is seems to be getting more and more hostile.
Pastor Wright will in the long-term be nothing more than a paragraph in a history book someday, if that.
That is if Barak can pass this test, this challenge and move forward in his debate with his opponents. And if he’s everything he’s said he is, than Pastor Wright just tossed him up a softball.