The Lantern

Issue date: 3/31/08 Section: Opinion

Barack Obama possesses something his Democratic rival has proven time and again she is fundamentally incapable of bearing: human relatability. No matter how many times Hillary Clinton sends a wide-eyed flurry of acknowledgements to a crowd member she fools the camera into believing she actually knows and no matter how many time she tells us she has been down in the dredges and knows what it is like to face the challenges of everyday Americans (or bullet-dodgers for that matter), I simply do not believe her. And I am not alone.

Obama's March 18 speech, in which he condemned the inflammatory remarks of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, while defending his association with the man, triggered something within me, as I am sure it did within others who saw it as well. Watching him I saw a man, not a politician but a man. His candor and openness were all too evident as he spoke of Wright as well as his white grandmother who once admitted her fear of walking past black men on the street, saying simply, "These people are a part of me."

Given a chance to tap into this newfound gray region of thoughtful tact - to offer her own brand of "from the heart" eloquence - Clinton shrugged it off and persisted on assailing her opponent for not leaving his longtime church. "(Wright) would not have been my pastor," she remarked during a March 26 press conference.

All Clinton had to do to solicit that same human emotion - that same heartfelt benevolence - was sympathize, and perhaps offer examples of individuals from her own life with whom she disagreed but remained close in spite of the fact. She did not. "We have a choice when it comes to the pastors and the churches we attend," she said.

Obama - in yet another example of his frequenting the high road - refrained from pointing out that we also choose our spouses.

The superb delivery of the Illinois senator's speech, in which he acknowledged the many racial grievances still prevalent in America, was certainly timely if at the very least for the sake of the poll numbers it sought to maintain but also for the content it so lucidly conveyed. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors the nation's hate groups, issued its quarterly "Intelligence Report," in which it cited the number of individual hate organizations in America as having risen 5 percent this past year to 888, a 48 percent increase from the number in 2000.

Clinton must learn that uniting the country means bringing people together who might - heaven forbid - disagree. This whole notion of "disowning" people for their beliefs is what got the country in the divided state it is currently in: split down the middle between red states and blue. Clinton must know by now that her opponent's rhetoric on unification is greatly resonating with now a majority of the very electorate she hopes to win over. Is it that she is too blind to see the impact it is having or is she simply unwilling to channel it into her own campaign?

Ben Zenitsky is a senior in journalism and Lantern opinion editor. He can be reached at zenitsky.1@osu.edu.

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