I’m still digesting the Obama speech on race from this morning. In the meantime, here are some thoughts on Obama from others.

Todd Spivak:

Obama has spent his entire political career trying to win the next step up. Every three years, he has aspired to a more powerful political position.

He was just 35 when in 1996 he won his first bid for political office. Even many of his staunchest supporters, such as Black, still resent the strong-arm tactics Obama employed to win his seat in the Illinois Legislature.

Victor Davis Hanson:

 Almost everything Barack Obama has said about his relationship with Wright is untrue. He is hardly ‘not particularly controversial’. No one needs to “cherry-pick” his sermons to find in them hatred; in some speeches that venom is the entire theme. Obama mentions Wright’s AIDs work—never that Wright blamed America for the AIDs epidemic. Obama mentions Wright’s positive work on apartheid, not that Wright claimed the U.S. put Mandela in jail. And on and on.

Rich Lowry:

Now that videotapes have surfaced of Wright’s more scorching diatribes — arguing that America deserved 9/11, exclaiming “God damn America” for spreading drugs in the black community, and declaring the U.S. the “US-KKK-a” — Obama professes shock, even though he attended the church for nearly two decades and Wright was his spiritual mentor. Evidently, Obama wants us to believe they never talked about anything besides the Gospel and the weather.