Obama's Speech

Newt Gingrich comments on Barack's speech:

"Illinois Democratic Sen. Barack Obama gave one speech in Philadelphia this week, but he made two different presentations.

The first was an apology and attempted explanation for his 20-year relationship with a preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who is viciously anti-American, racist and anti-Semitic and for his membership in a church which had honored Louis Farrakhan.

The second presentation was an eloquent but fundamentally inadequate speech about racism and poverty in America.

Sen. Obama's first presentation was very troubling. It offers two possibilities for judging his character, both of which are unsettling.

The first possibility is that Sen. Obama did not notice the racism, anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism coming from the pulpit in 20 years of attending Pastor Wright's sermons. He failed to register as troubling Pastor Wright's trip to Libya with Louis Farrakhan to see Muammar Qaddafi or the church's giving Farrakhan a lifetime achievement award.

But if this is true, it is a devastating insight into any possibility that Sen. Obama is ready to be President. How could we expect him to act with judgment and responsibility in Iran and Iraq, to pick a Supreme Court Justice or to undertake any other complex act under the pressing reality of being president when he could not notice reality in 20 years at his church.

On the other hand, if he noticed the goings on in his church but failed to act on them, what does that tell us about his honesty and his courage?

After all, it was Sen. Obama himself who set the standard. As Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby noted, "When Don Imus uttered his infamous slur on the radio last year, Obama cut him no slack. Imus should be fired, he said. 'There's nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group.'"

I understand this standard. When I first became speaker of the House, we hired a House historian who turned out to have written very controversial things. We asked for her resignation within 24 hours of learning what she had done.

Clearly, when it comes to Pastor Wright, Sen. Obama has fallen short of his own standard by about 20 years.

Still, the fascinating opportunity Sen. Obama offers is to begin a genuine dialogue on race and poverty in America.

The sections of his speech on race and poverty were eloquent -- but they were fundamentally inaccurate and inadequate.

As such, they create a real opportunity to engage Sen. Obama in a national dialogue about why poverty exists on the Southside of Chicago, why Detroit has been a disaster and why there is so much crime in Philadelphia.

This is the best opportunity conservatives have had in our lifetime to engage a serious politician of the left on a national dialogue about how to help every American pursue happiness.

Sen. Obama's analysis in his Philadelphia speech was so filled with inaccuracies and was so inadequate in its proposed remedies that it must be responded to. However, the event could be the beginning of a major national effort to discuss how we can help poor people, poor neighborhoods and impoverished Americans.

African-Americans in particular have been impoverished by the bad government policies of Detroit. What would Sen. Obama do to reform the bad city government, failed public safety policies and terrible school system?

I find myself in general agreement with Newt. It should be pointed out here, and it's not unimportant, that Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia are Democrat intensive - very liberal - and have been run by Democrat politicians for many years. And this is the end result? This is what you get from being under the spell of "nannyism"? This is your idea of a cradle to grave utopia?