Obama Needs to Take His Message Home

It wasn’t just the pastors at Trinity United Church of Christ that continued to cause problems for Barack Obama. It was the congregation at the nearly all-black church that was becoming a headache for the Obama campaign.

In the videos from the church, showing clergymen spewing racist views from the pulpit platform, church members are seen and heard shouting their approval, time and again. These are people that sat in the pews alongside the presidential candidate, ate with him at church fellowships and walked the streets on his organizing missions.

They cheered the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for years as he lectured them on the evils of so-called white America, they granted him a lucrative retirement plan and a new mansion to live in, they replaced him with a younger man who continues the church’s legacy of “black theology,” and last Sunday they worked themselves into a frenzy as a guest pastor mocked Hillary Clinton as a white woman who felt “entitled” to inherit the presidency.

Anti-white racism is a theme embraced by Obama’s fellow churchgoers. He has denounced some of the comments of the congregation’s leaders; now is the time that he denounces the racism demonstrated by many in the congregation itself.

In the latest video recording, a renegade Catholic priest is shown entertaining the congregation last weekend in an insulting mockery of Mrs. Clinton. “This is mine. I’m Bill’s wife. I’m white. And this is mine,” Father Michael Pfleger says while pacing the stage in portraying Clinton. “I’m white. I’m entitled. There’s a black man stealing my show.”

When the video showed up in national newscasts Thursday, Pfleger said he regretted his dramatic derision of Clinton.

“I regret the words I chose on Sunday,” he said in a statement. “I am deeply sorry if they offended Sen. Clinton or anyone else who saw them.”

“If?”

How possibly could Clinton not have been offended? If?

Apparently there is some doubt lingering in Pfleger’s mind that his scornful remarks might not have been - or should not have been - offensive to Clinton or “anyone else.”

It is obvious that some weren’t offended, as shown on the video. Many people in the audience at Trinity United cheered him on and jumped in joy as he continued his contemptuous routine.

In response to the priest’s performance in his hometown church, Obama said, “I am deeply disappointed in Father Pfleger’s divisive, backward-looking rhetoric, which doesn’t reflect the country I see or the desire of people across America to come together in common cause.”

But it does reflect the feelings of many in his church, and he belatedly denounced that.

In fact, Obama continued to pledge his loyalty to Trinity United, despite its open-arms attitude toward racist speakers until yesterday when the heat forced him out of the kitchen.

Like his close association with Rev. Wright, Obama has long been a friend of Father Pfleger. The Catholic priest, whose parish is nearly all black, participated in an Iowa campaign event for Obama and described himself as providing “spiritual counsel” for the candidate.

If Obama is sincere about his message of “unity,” he could make a dramatic gesture to demonstrate that commitment. He could start uniting America by uniting his own church congregation.

Obama should attend at Sunday service at Trinity United and make his case for racial harmony. He should appear before his fellow churchgoers and denounce the racist attitude of Wright, Pfleger and others - including the racist Louis Farrakhan - who have promoted bigotry and racial separatism from the pulpit. And he should call on the congregation not to extend its hospitality - let alone its cheers and applause - to such speech in the future.

Of course, Obama is unlikely to take such advice.

He is comfortable in calling for racial unity on the campaign trail, but he has yet to take that message into his old neighborhood of south Chicago, where Rev. Wright is celebrated as a folk hero.