Barack Obama's Campaign Strategy Unveiled

I have pondered long and hard the campaign strategy of Senator Barack Obama.  I have decided that it has come down to four steps:

1. Open mouth.
2. Insert foot.
3. Complain when your opponents point out that your foot is in your mouth.
4. Repeat.

Case in point:  his Meet the Depressed appearance this past Sunday.

Fresh off his ponderous and bizarre defense of the "Reverend" Jeremiah Wright in Philadelphia, where he threw his grandmother under the bus driven by the "Reverend", and the bizarre back-stab maneuver of the "Reverend" at the National Press Club, Senator Obam found himself trying to defend his choice of church:

I think that the American people understand that when I joined Trinity United Church of Christ, I was committing not to Pastor Wright, I was committing to a church and I was committing to Christ. And it is a wonderful church. It's a member of the United Church of Christ, a denomination that dates back to the battles around abolition.

That's all well and good, but the fact is that "Reverend" Wright was the leader of that church, a church that Senator Obama and his wife gave tremendous sums of money to.  The "Reverend" Wright married him. Baptized his children.  And spewed hate and filth from the pulpit.

As they say down South, "that don't won't hunt".

And claiming that the church is part of a denomination that goes back to before abolition doesn't mean a whole lot.  The Methodist Church goes back further-- in fact, the Methodists of the first half of the 1800s were the religious right of their day.  But those Methodists wouldn't recognize the United Methodist church of today.  Same can be said for Presbyterians, Baptists, Lutherans, Congregationalists, Unitarians, and, yes, even Catholics.  (Don't even get me started on Episcopalians!)

Or, as we've heard before "What have you done for me lately?"

In fact, the United Church of Christ today -- as Mark Hemingway points out over National Review Online:

Over at the UCC website you can find out why God wants you to protest the FCC over media consolidation, campaign against legislation that mandates employers verify the legal citizenship of employees, prevent social security privatization, participate in an “Economic Justice Young Adult Team Immersion Experience,” decry Wal-Mart's lack of “corporate social responsibility”, and understand that "safe and legal abortion is consistent with a woman’s right to follow the dictates of her own faith" and so on. Oh and let's not forget the time Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, called the UCC “functionally anti-Semitic.”

1. Open mouth.
2. Insert foot.
3. Complain when your opponents point out that your foot is in your mouth.
4. Repeat.

Because "we are the change we have been waiting for".