Florigan, Wright, and Leahy

Hello everyone. Sorry, it's been a while since my last entry. Since I've been gone, there have been no primaries, but there has been plenty of bickering between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Let me catch you up on the last month or so, in case you missed it.

First, there was the debate about if and how Florida and Michigan were going to vote again. Through deft maneuvering in the courts, it looks like Obama's people were successful. It looks like these two states will not vote again.

This is a big blow to the Clinton campaign, because they have reached a point in the campaign where it is almost a mathematic impossibility to overtake Obama's number of pledged delegates because of the Democratic party's system of allocating delegates proportionally and those states could have helped her close the gap.

She needs to win out up until June 3rd and overtake him in the popular vote to really make a strong case to the superdelegates.

Then came the Rev. Jeremiah Wright ordeal. Basically, this man has been Obama's pastor for the past twenty years at his church in Chicago, and said "God damn America" in a sermon while he was being filmed.

In context, he was speaking about racial inequality in America, and the whole thing has really hurt Obama in a few ways. Firstly, his patriotism and religious credibility have come into question because of this incident.

But more importantly, it has brought up the very delicate issue of race, which of course the predominantly white media eats up. It is still getting incredible amounts of media attention a few weeks after the story originally broke.

But there's really not that much to this. Rev. Wright is not "insane" like everyone on the media is saying. Yes, he is a frustrated, extremely opinionated, old, black minister. But he is saying exactly what he believes, and is fully in his right mind. To say otherwise means that you are missing the point of his surprisingly plausible message.

What people seem to be missing is that his views are not automatically Obama's views. The only part of this that is Obama's fault is the long period of time in which he remained in his church after listening to Wright's controversial sermons.

After about a week of all of this controversy, Obama came out with one of his most memorable and historic speeches yet, on the topic of race. He basically said that he wanted the discussion about race to be open and public, not a hushed topic of conversation.

But once again, the issue of race reared it's ugly head, and was fueled infinitely by the media. If Obama becomes the Democratic nominee, I assure you that this will not be the last time that the topic of race will come up in a big way.

And lastly, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) called for Clinton to step down this week to begin the party healing. Clinton has repeatedly responded to this by vowing to stay in all the way to the convention. But as more and more party leaders are saying that they want all of this settled by July 1st, that is looking less and less likely.