Obama to make speech on race relations today

In what his campaign is referring to as a "a major address on race and politics" Senator Barack Obama plans to address head-on his relationship with his Pastor Jeremiah Wright and the controversy that generated by his Pastor's over-the-top rhetoric regarding America and Whites. Obama will use as his backdrop the National Constitution Center near Philadelphia's Independence Hall. It was at this site in 1787 that the nation's founders counted each slave as three-fifths of a person during the period Southern slave holding states were joined by Northern free states in order to draft the U.S. Consititution and form a Union between the former British colonies.

Mr. Obama whose mother was a white anthropologist from Kansas and whose father was a Kenyan government bureaucrat has billed himself as being a new kind of candidate in a post-racial era. After the thunderous and incendiary pronouncements made by Obama's Pastor of 20 years, the Illinois Senator from Chicago's south side has chosen to meet the roiling controversy about the Reverand Wright's outlandish sermons and his own knowledge or professed lack of knowledge of his Pastor's viewpoints head-on.

As a result of the negative publicity surrounding his church and its Pastor, Obama has seen his favorability rating among likely voters drop from 53% to 47% in only a few days according to the latest Rasmussen poll released this weekend . In one of his ear-popping sermons, the Reverand Jeremiah Wright declared, "No, no, no, not God Bless America, God damn America for treating our citizens as far less than human.". In another sermon delivered just five days after the 9/11 attacks the Reverand Wright blared that the nation's "chickens were coming home to roost" and that "we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon,".

Obama has steadily distanced himself from his one-time spiritual mentor and advisor, revoking an invitation to have him speak at the announcement for his candidacy, at some points calling his Pastor's statements "provocative" and at others likening him to a "crazy old uncle" and finally dropping him from the campaign altogether. Expect to hear Obama consign his Pastor and his ideas to the realm of 1960's activism and acknowledge that while these ideas had their place in history it it now time to move on to a brighter, more promising tomorrow. Obama has certainly moved on in his affiliation with Jeremiah Wright now that this association has become a major liability. In his own eloquent way Barack Obama will declare that Jeremiah Wright and his ideas are yesterday's news.

He may want to reconsider that ringing endorsement from the New Black Panther Party on his website.