So this is what really matters huh? The outcome determining issue of the most important election of our generation may end up being what a preacher had to say on Sunday morning. God bless America because we suffer from a twisted attention span. I'm not sure how long the issue of Senator Obama v. Reverend Wright has been going on or will continue but its been far too long or better stated, its been at the top of the agenda for far too long. I won't go into depth about my opinion on what should or shouldn't have happened because the subject has been adequately covered from both sides. But I will say that in Politics one of the top 5 rules is if you're on the team you fall on the sword for the candidate. You step in the line of fire and take it for the team. However, Reverend Wright was benched from the squad back when the Senator announced his candidacy for President in Springfield and public concern about their relationship led him to remove Reverend Wright from the announcement ceremony (I think he was supposed to give the opening prayer or something similar). Maybe that was the first in a line of snubs that made the Pastor develop a "bitterness" that made him no longer feel part of the team and thus no longer required to take one. Either way, it is what it is and what's done is done.
The thing that disturbs me most isn't how this unfolded; what really disturbs me is how much attention has been placed on how it unfolded relative to issues that have far greater impact to our community. In many ways, this issue is equivalent to the question of whether Jay-Z and Beyonce are really married; its interesting to think about but in reality it doesn't change our day to day life. When you compare this to the rise in homicides in Chicago and the fear that this will be a bloody summer, it's ridiculous that three leaders with ties to the city haven't made a strong statement concerning that issue. Further, while Senator Clinton was taking shots of Crown and Senator Obama was apologizing for calling people bitter, the GOP candidate was in New Orleans promising people he wouldn't let the levies wash them away the next time around. I doubt if he got deep into the other issues that currently plague the city (violence, low performing schools, absence of infrastructure) but he was there nonetheless. Where's John Edwards when you need him?
Martin Luther King said the American attention span was 72 hours long but I don't think he factored in our love for scandal. The biggest political issues of 2008 have been Governor Spitzer's love for working women, Senator Obama's pastor and President Clinton's use of the race card. I feel kind of stupid because I really believed it was good for the Democratic Party to have the primary fight last until the convention. My thought was the longer this goes on the more each candidate will have to explain how they will accomplish the goals so well summarized in their platforms. I thought we would get to the meat and potatoes of the things that plague our country: poverty, education reform, energy independence, repairing our image in the international community, ect. I hoped the "scandalous" sidetracking would be about why the Clinton Administration ended welfare and why Senator Clinton hasn't proposed a practical remedy or why Senator Obama, still listed as a professor at University of Chicago Law, didn't put the legal issues surrounding Jena 6 or Sean Bell into layman's terms so that lesser educated folk could know what really happened in the courtroom. Instead, here we are wondering whether Wright is right or wrong. Only in America.
