Obama is a striking orator, and that’s a good thing. In fact, I’d say that it shows his leadership qualities. There are important questions about his policies, but less so insofar as they reflect on leadership. Anyone can come up with policies, even extreme, nation-changing stuff. Ron Paul had some, but he turned out to be far less of a leader than anyone else on the GOP side. Spurring policies into action is more a matter of inspiration than of legislative draftsmanship.

I do recall that episode, and what I heard were a bunch of ‘non denial denials’. Calling the book “a farrago of lies” is different to saying “I have not had any homosexual relationship”. I challenge you (and you may well be up to the challenge) or producing a (Clintonesque) denial of that kind.

In fact he frequently denied rumours of any non-heterosexual impropriety, during his political career, most famously in 1979 when “It’s Grossly Improper” was published alleging that Dunstan not only had a clandestine lover – John Ceruto – but that he’d put him on the public payroll. “A farrago of lies” insisted Don. The authors were of course right on both counts and they never worked in Adelaide again

It’s a mark of his enduring aura that the memory of this has faded into the broader narrative about his bravery – audacity as Nicholas accurately puts it – in tackling a huge range of social issues – homosexual decriminalisation etc and that’s probably the way it should be. These days, I often hear people talking about Don being our first out gay politician.

I certainly don’t think that “blame” accrues to him for not being upfront about it -it was the temper of the times. No politician would have survived such a disclosure (most would think very, very carefully about it now) and anyway, he had wives, children, the whole messy nine yards of the 1970’s closet…..but it’s interesting how memory moves to fit the historical legacy.

When I listened to the speech, the mention of his grandmother did not seem out of context and did not seem designed to defend the statements of Reverend Wright. He was not saying “my white gran is a racist so it is OK for the black Reverend Wright to make inflammatory remarks”. What he was saying is that it is possible to profoundly disagree with the views of people you love, but that does not mean that you cut them out of your life. And that the bigger picture is the need for the US to open a further discourse about racial issues if they are to move forward. In that respect, the overall speech impressed me and the criticisms are nit-picking.

I see Obama as someone who has a better overall vision than McCain or Clinton. Whether his vision is just “snake oil” as Ken seems to believe or something more “honest” as Nicholas believes remains to be seen. Either way, he seems to be offering a bit of inspiration and he could not be less substantial than the current incumbent. If he chooses good quality people around him he should do a reasonable job.

More generally, an athiest could never be president of the US, whereas in Australia we have historically regarded a person’s religious beliefs (let alone what their ministers of relkigion say) as unimportant. Hawke was an athiest and no-one seemed to mind; while Rudd’s emphasis on his Christian beliefs is a relatively new phenomenon for an Australian PM (and one that makes me uneasy).

Obama might have said the same about rumours that he was Muslim – but I fully understand why he didn’t.

I remember on one occasion Dunstan’s genuine outrage at the unprincipled nature of some attack on him by his opponents. Most politicians are inured to this kind of thing, and their outrage is slightly muted through an ‘another day another dollar’ kind of tone.

Dunstan was genuinely outraged when (I think) Phillip Lynch accused him of something that Lynch had just made up to try to get Dunstan denying something.

And I thought Obama’s ‘my grandmother was a racist’ speech was abysmal, appalling – even if some thought it was politically astute.

I’d trust a used car salesman over Obama at this point. Used car salesmen at least don’t believe their own spin.

Which creates a major problem for us voters .

One which the Americans generally solve by voting for people who have previously governed…

This is the first race I can recall in which there is not even an executive candidate. McCain comes closest solely by virtue of age – hence perhaps simultaneously his greatest strength and weakness.

In this example, grandmother should clearly be hailed for her prescience……..

“That the ludicrously vain Don Dunstan would not only have been able to succeed as a politician despite his uncompromising refusal to deny his homosexuality”

He was a remarkable guy but he was never out as a politician. He actually divorced his first wife and married his second while he was Premier. It was her death in 1978 (and the impending publication of a book that featured his relationship with another man – which he famously deemed a “farrago of lies”) that precipitated his resignation as Premier. When he did eventually begin to publicly acknowledge his “difference” (in the 80’s) he framed it as bisexuality rather than homosexuality.

There’s arguably a parallel here with Obama. Dunstan was flamboyant, glamorously progressive and a breath of fresh air but the fact that he was ostensibly married with kids provided a kind of comfort zone within which the burghers of Adelaide were spared the necessity of focussing on their Premier doing unspeakable things with some bloke. While rumours were rife, they could be put down to Don being a bit different…..

Equally, given his eclectic and attractively exotic origins, Obama might be a safe African-American option for those who might have some trepidation about the historical baggage pertaining to a more traditionally framed Black politician.

And Im in agreement with Nicholas on his interpretation of Wright-Grandmagate

When I’m not squirming a little – as I confessed in the last comment – I’m thinking “So Obama said some difficult to swallow things about his grandmum. That’s kind of the point isn’t it, that we can say difficult things?” Of course that doesn’t fully answer Ken’s point, because his point is about the ethics of the private/public divide. “Why did he drag her into it?” A fair question, but all we have is our curiosity. We can’t answer it. Only Obama and perhaps his grandmum can answer.

As Nicholas says, he’s not aiming to exculpate himself, nor to throw anyone to the dogs. He’s trying to show that life and people are complex, that good is mixed in with bad in all of us and that in forming our judgements — if and where we must — account should be taken of this complexity. I don’t see that mentioning the racial fears and prejudices felt by his grandmother dishonours her in any way. It’s simply a concrete, and therefore more powerful, illustration of the fact that such feelings have long been, and still are, part of the fabric of American life. His point is precisely that acknowledging these sorts of uncomfortable facts should not mean that we have to jettison people, to leap to hasty judgements. As he immediately goes on to say “These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.”

More importantly, having been forced by the media reaction to explain his relationship to Wright, he clearly decided to use the example of Wright (and of his his grandmother and indeed the controversy surrounding Ferraro’s remarks) to open out into a wider discussion of race in America. I’d guess he’s long pondered whether to seriously delve into this loaded issue. This furore over his pastor left him with only two options. To dump the man or to try to be true, to properly explain, with all the attendent risks. This comment at Obsidian Wings sums it up nicely:

My fear was that Obama, in opting to give the speech, was giving into the trumped up and bogus frenzy. While I knew this specific controversy would pass, my more general fear was that Obama the candidate and president would be pressured to twist in the Beltway winds.

But he didnt do that. He forcefully distanced himself from Wrights words, but spoke movingly and unapologetically of his connections to the man. He didnt run and hide in Kerry/Daschle-esque cowardly fashion. He stood right up and said, yes, hes my friend. He cast him as mired in the old world, to be sure, but he didnt give into the Russert-style pressure to do some sort of Maoist confessional disavowing all association with the man.

Perhaps Obama is a charlatan and his persona and platform are merely carefully calculated acts. Still, the fact that he chose to take the hard choice over the Wright controversy surely bolsters the hope that he may be at least something like the image he portrays. Certainly, for now at least, taking that chance seems preferable to trudging the tired, sad, failed old roads offered by Clinton and McCain.

Obama was being open and honest. He was telling a personal heartfelt story explaining how you still love and care for family members, even if they have views which you find abohrent.

I think those making this case against him are being technical and are mising the big picture.

Since the Rev Wright has been compared to Jerry Falwell (who made idiotic comments about S11 similar to Wright’s comments about AIDS being a white man’s invention to kill blacks) perhaps a good analogy would be if George Bush had defended Falwell by referring to how ‘my grandmother used to express her dislike of her gay neighbours and hence by extension all gays because they liked to play Kylie at full blast on Friday nights’.

Writers do that all the time – though they may not call them autobiographies. Helen Garner is an example. DH Lawrence. Etc Etc.

I can’t see a problem with it at all. Most people who’ve read Obama’s books – I haven’t – are pretty impressed. He likes words, he likes articulating his experience, reciting his views, relating his life and experience to his beliefs. That’s pretty much what we do here every day. And at some stage he got ambitious – and he thought it might work for him. Can’t see a problem. Churchill did the same, though I don’t know when he published ‘my early life’ he was serialising his life for the papers in the Boer War.

As for the grandmother thing, what do we know. That Steve Sailer assumes it must be written up in his autobiography, and on finding that no such event is described assumes that Obama is lying – when the alternative explanation is that the bit Steve is quoting isn’t the same incident Obama’s speaking of – like Tim said!

You might be right on this Ken, but let’s just slow down a bit. Firstly he did not use the story to ‘exculpate’ himself. He used it to illustrate the point of his speech which is that one can deeply love and feel gratitude to a person and yet disagree with them profoundly and indeed be deeply offended by them, offended to one’s core.

Secondly I am very slow to judge this kind of thing because I don’t know the kind of ethics of the family in question, I don’t know the situation he is referring to, I don’t know her, I don’t know their relations and so on. But I admit it does make me squirm a little, and I may be being too generous. I just don’t know.

For me, Obama’s racism speech and the events leading up to it encapsulate his unprincipled slipperiness. He claims that he had never heard (or heard about) Rev Wright’s specific inflammatory, racist, anti-American statements (inter alia blaming the US government for September 11) that recently hit the headlines but admits that he heard similar ones over the years, presumably not quite so extreme as to require forthright condemnation. However, he admits that when “these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign”. He says that he then condemned Wright’s remarks, but it must have been rather sotto voce because the condemnation seemingly didn’t hit the national media until the issue became a major controversy around 14 March. It’s not possible to be certain that this is a lie, but it doesn’t sound all that credible.

However, even if you feel comfortable with those events, I fail to see how anyone could feel comfortable about his use of his grandmother in his now famous racism speech on 18 March. Suggesting he threw grandma under the train (as Steve Sailer did) is rather mild if anything. Obama seeks to excuse his own failure to disassociate himself from Wright or to condemn him more forthrightly and sooner, by equating Wright’s conduct to that of his own grandmother:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

Now, I acknowledge that it’s conceivable though highly unlikely that Obama is referring to a completely different event than the ones recounted in his autobiography (what sort of wanker reckons they’ve lived enough and know enough to write an autobiography at the age of 34?) and summarised by Steve Sailer. However, even if that’s true, the most that can be said is that his aged grandmother privately expressed to her own most intimate family members a fear about an aggressive black beggar accosting her for money, when she wouldn’t have had that reaction if the beggar had been white. There is no comparison whatever between that situation and Rev Wright, who on Obama’s own admission preached inflammatory, racist and anti-American sermons to large black congregations over a period of years (including blaming America for 9/11). For Obama to suggest otherwise is repugnant in the extreme, and I can’t understand how generally sensible people like Nicholas Gruen could think anything else.

Moreover, and by Obama’s own account, neither he nor his father were present when the begging incident took place. Thus, neither is in a position to dismiss the grandmother’s reaction as stemming from racism. They don’t and can’t know how large, threatening or aggressive the beggar was compared with any other beggars she might previously have been accosted by, for an old woman in the situation in which she found herself.

For example, I was accosted by a large Aboriginal beggar only last Saturday at Parap markets, a very populated location. He was much younger than me and much larger, and referred to me as “granddad” (what an insult!). He demanded money aggressively, and when I said “no” he asked “why?”, again quite aggressively. I was momentarily slightly anxious, despite being a bloke who could probably have defended myself if pushed, and in a situation where others would have quickly intervened if the situation had escalated. Was my momentary fear motivated by racism? I don’t think so. Was Obama’s grandmother’s? I don’t know and nor does Obama, but I seriously doubt it.

For Obama to use this incident to exculpate himself from blame over Rev Wright is contemptible.

Well said Disraeli.

I agree with Nicholas. Obama inspires hope of real change. He comes across to me as heartfelt and sincere. I hope that he still has a chance of becoming the next US President.

I believe, like you, his speech on race was brilliant.

People such as Ken are missing the point.

A ‘typical’ politician would have let the ‘minister’ be eaten by the wolves.

Only a great man could have both shown how profoundly he disagreed yet at the same time how he would still be his friend. this has never occured to me but has to two friends of mine.

We know too from his work in the State legislature that he attempts to practice what he preaches.

He can be roundly criticised for his economic policies not not on this unless you just do not like the man. in that case it merely reinforces your belief.

I admired Bob Hawke as PM and had no problem with his vanity, and I admired Paul Keating as Treasurer though not PM. I don’t think I have unrealistically utopian ideas about what politicians could or should be.

Obama might yet turn out to be an excellent leader. We won’t know until he’s tested. At the moment all that any of us knows is what Obama says and how he says it, because he really doesn’t have a significant track record to assess. When you and apparently many others hear him, you hear someone you hope/believe is a great and sincere orator with genuine aspirations to forge “a new kind of politics”. When I hear him I hear a used car salesman. One of us is probably wrong, or more likely he’ll turn out somewhere between these polar opposite evaluations. But in both cases we’re reacting to subjective impressions of mere words and demeanour. I don’t think there’s much more than that to be said and I don’t think it’s possible to say who is right and who is wrong, although it’s interesting that our respective visceral reactions to him are so opposite.