Obama has become target of sick minds

When Chicagoans who know Sen. Obama read the columns about him turned out by the national punditocracy, we tend to gasp and shake our heads in bemusement. He has become an ink blot for sick minds, very clever sick minds. Call up realclearpolitics.com and see what I mean. My favorite recent outbursts of hate come from Thomas Sowell, an African-American conservative economist, and from Naomi Schaefer Riley, the "assistant taste editor" of the Wall Street Journal (which title may be an oxymoron). Both write about Obama's connection with the Trinity United Church of Christ.

Professor Sowell says the senator was a left-wing radical when he left Harvard University and joined the church because he was at home with the radical congregation. Riley contends he joined the church because he could collect its 8,000 votes when he ran for public office. Neither expert, I daresay, ever drove by the church on 95th Street on Sunday morning. The people, including the young ones, are the best dressed and best groomed congregants I have ever seen, and they emerge from the most elegant collection of cars displayed in Sunday morning Chicago. No Catholic parish in Chicago I know of displays such relaxed prosperity on a Sunday. This is not Rev. Jess territory nor do the congregants look like radical white-haters.

Recently they put the entire sermon from which Rev. Wright's incendiary remarks were excerpted online to show that they were drawn out of context, as were most of the other clips. Someone assembled the YouTube show to do the maximum possible damage. It would appear, however, from the most recent Wall Street Journal poll, the senator has recovered from the scandal, but he still lags badly in Pennsylvania.

Professor Sowell asserts that Barack Obama had to abandon his radical stance when he became a national public figure; he had to "project an entirely different persona, that of a post-racial leader who can heal divisiveness and bring us all together. The ease with which he has accomplished his chameleonlike change is a tribute to the man's talent and a warning about his reliability."

Anyone who knows anything about Obama's activity as a community organizer in Chicago, even before he joined Trinity knows his style was always one of bringing people together in consensus. For someone with legitimate claims to scholarship, Sowell is curiously innocent of regard for facts.

Riley sees his joining the church as an exercise in hypocrisy, a religious move to win votes and points out as proof that he rarely addresses himself to religious themes in his speeches. Apparently the healing of conflict is not a religious theme.

Sowell is unaware of the facts of the senator's coming to political maturity, which is bad enough. Riley claims the gift of scrutatio cordium, reading human motivation and smelling out hypocrisy. She is both more clever and nastier than Sowell. If you are a taste editor at the Journal, you don't have to explain how you know that another human person is guilty of hypocrisy.

Note that both are political conservatives, but their criticism is aimed not any specific position but at Sen. Obama personally. They simply can't stand him.

Neither columnist is capable of delivering a precinct, no matter how skillful their fiction. However, their venom indicates that both are offended by this attractive, charismatic and intelligent young man. The last American politician who was the subject of such animus was JFK.

Comment at suntimes.com.

Photo: Joseph Kaczmarek, AP / Sen. Barack Obama speaks at a rally Monday at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa. ;