One thing that Barack Obama has to recognize, folks — and the rest of us do, too — is I’m sick and tired of guilt.

I’m sick and tired of forced guilt brought on by the race business on the left. What we have to understand we are making great strides; the great progress we have made in all of this.

Reverend Wright sees none of it because he doesn’t want to see any of it, because to him it isn’t about race. It is about hate! Reverend Wright may believe in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, but where on the left do we see anybody talking about “life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” as distinctive human things that we are fortunate enough to have endowed in our founding documents?

What Senator Obama must realize, is he is not the agent of racial healing. He is the product of it.

We have for the first time in American history, a black man who is the likely nominee of his party, to run for president of the United States. Somehow, this is going to be turned and convoluted and contorted into some sort of misrepresentation of what it really is.

To repeat: Senator Obama is not the agent of racial healing. He is the product of it.

Too many people are going to look at him as the agent of it. I saw enough evidence on cable networks this morning following the speech to now know exactly what is meant by “white guilt.” Shelby Steele has a great piece, by the way, in the Wall Street Journal about this. As you know, he’s written a book called White Guilt, he makes a great point in his piece today in the Wall Street Journal: “The Obama Bargain.” Shelby Steele is a black man, folks, and he’s around Reverend Wright’s age — same generation.

Yet Reverend Wright is stuck forever in his hatred for America, and Shelby Steele is just the opposite. Obama would be better served to have role models such as Shelby Steele, than Reverend Wright.

So, asks today Shelby Steele in the Wall Street Journal:

“How to turn one’s blackness to advantage? The answer is that one ‘bargains.’ Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America’s history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer’s race against him. And whites love this bargain — and feel affection for the bargainer — because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.”

He says that is the essence of Barack Obama, which, by the way, is now gone in this campaign. Barack Obama stripped away the mask today and made it plain that his candidacy is about race — and let’s not forget where he gave the speech. He gave it in Philadelphia. This is still presidential politics going on here. Some of you might think that this was a forerunner of an inauguration speech. I’ve even heard somebody say it was the most important racial speech since Martin Luther King. That’s a bunch of bunk.

This was a political speech in the state where the next primary is being held, where Barack Obama is running ads on radio stations urging Republicans to cross over and register to vote for him. “[I]n the end, Barack Obama’s candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton’s or Jesse Jackson’s. … [Those two] were not bargainers.” They were confrontationalists, and when you confront, you lose. “Like these more irascible of his forebearers, Mr. Obama’s run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance.”

Amen.

Shelby Steele, writing today in the Wall Street Journal. Barack Obama, his campaign for the presidency, is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on any substance.

That nails it.

Referece: The Obama Bargain