by Geoff Staples

Barack Obama’s “hope” is the new version of Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America.” Like Ronald Reagan, Obama is a charismatic and inspirational speaker. That’s not where the similarity ends.

Ronald Reagan went to Philadelphia, Mississippi to make his notorious states’ rights speech and pander to Southern racist bigots during his 1982 election campaign. Obama claims that civil and human rights for gays and lesbians are states’ rights issues and Obama sent the rabidly anti-gay Donny McClurkin to denounce gays and lesbians from the stage of his South Carolina gospel tour.

I don’t believe black evangelicals to be anti-gay bigots, but Obama does, or he wouldn’t have sent McClurkin to do the dirty in South Carolina. All Democrats should be outraged that Obama would insult black evangelicals by assuming them to be bigots.

Obama has attended a racist church for 20 years. He claims that most whites, like his white grandmothermother, are afraid of blacks. Reverend James Meeks, another Obama spiritual and political mentor, has been cited by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a leading black partner of Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defense Fund. What are we to make of this? Obama wants us to ignore his close association with hate-mongers and bigots while he leads the Democratic Party down a rat hole into the same sewer in which the Republican Party has so proudly lived for the last 30 years.

The tragedy of an Obama nomination is two-fold.

Because Obama is black, he can rip the Democratic party apart and destroy the progressive alliance between Jews, blacks, gays, the poor, and other despised, disaffected, or disenfranchised groups, and progressive and liberal whites - Christian or otherwise.

We Democrats must stick to our principles of equality and justice for all persons. We must make it clear we won’t nominate or vote for anyone who would pander to bigotry to win a Democratic nomination or an election.

In this election, Democratic principles are ascendant. This election is not about hope and change. It is about completing the Democratic agenda we have worked to achieve: civil and human rights, equality and justice, and educational and economic opportunity for all. This is what Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton worked to achieve, but their work is not finished. 

This election is an important opportunity. We cannot allow our Democratic Party to be turned from its course just as we have public support to achieve these goals. If we blow it, we may not have another opportunity during our lifetimes.

Completing our work is the only true source of hope. Don’t fall for Barack Obama’s hollow words.