Will the Real Barack Obama Please Stand Up?

Writing today in The National Review, author and columnist Thomas Sowell says critics of Senator Barack Obama make a strategic mistake when they talk about his “past associations.” That just gives his many defenders in the media an opportunity to counter-attack against “guilt by association.”

We all have associations, whether at the office, in our neighborhood, or in various recreational activities. Most of us neither know nor care what our associates believe or say about politics.

Associations are very different from alliances. Allies are not just people who happen to be where you are or who happen to be doing the same things you do. You choose allies deliberately for a reason. The kind of allies you choose says something about you.

Sowell points out that Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, William Ayers, and Antoin Rezko are not just people who happened to be at the same place at the same time as Barack Obama. They are people with whom he chose to ally himself for years, and with some of whom some serious money changed hands.

Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, William Ayers, and Antoin Rezko are not associations, they are alliances.

Some gave political support, and some gave financial support, to Obama’s election campaigns, and Obama in turn contributed either his own money or the taxpayers’ money to some of them. That is a familiar political alliance — but an alliance is not just an “association” from being at the same place at the same time.

Sowell concludes by saying much of the public and the media have been so mesmerized by the words and the image of Obama, and so little interested in learning about the factual reality, was perhaps best explained by an official of the Democratic party: “People don’t come to Obama for what he’s done, they come because of what they hope he can be.”

However, the inconvenient facts are unlikely to change the minds of Obama’s true believers, who have made up their minds and don’t want to be confused by the facts.

Read it.