General Pres. Candidate 08 Thread

[jacktruth]

Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Obama's Metaphor Problem

Posted by Dean Barnett | 10:40 AM

According to the New York Times, Barack Obama has a friendship with a controversial pastor, one Jeremiah A. Wright. Obama is making efforts to distance himself from Wright, who once was the pastor of Obama’s church.

“When his enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli” to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Mr. Wright recalled, “with Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.” Mr. Wright added that his trip implied no endorsement of either Louis Farrakhan’s views or Qaddafi’s.
As keen-eyed readers will note, snowballs in hell don’t dry up. They melt. Can we really trust a presidential candidate who cozies up to people with such flimsy control over their metaphors?

And this problem extends to Obama himself. During his Bloody Sunday commemoration speech in Selma on Sunday, Obama said that the events of Bloody Sunday prodded his parents (one black, one white) to marry. Only problem is, his parents married three years before bloody Sunday. Obama defended this misstep by saying he was speaking metaphorically about the effects that the entire Civil Rights movement had on his parents.

I tried this at home last night when Mrs. Soxblog challenged me on an apparent untruth I had told about emptying the dishwasher. I told her that I was speaking metaphorically about my general efforts to keep the house tidy and that she shouldn’t be confused by my clumsy reference to the dishwasher. Sadly, my ruse didn’t work. Oh, to have even a touch of that Obama magic!