"Shields, Brooks Debate New Polls, Rev. Wright and Gas Tax" PBS News Hour transcript
DAVID BROOKS (Columnist, New York Times): This is stuff Reverend Wright's been saying for 20 years. I mean, the stuff he said was not new. I mean, I presume, when you go to a liberation theology church, you're going to get some liberation theology.
You're going to get what Wright offered, which is sort of an extreme version of separatism, whites and blacks clap differently to music, whites and blacks think differently, have different learning styles, a very separatist ideology.
And that was part of the church he went to. And that's part of the things we have to understand about Obama, that he sat in that church and he wasn't offended by all that.
Now, you take that as an element of Obama's character and the reasons he went to that church are something we can all speculate without really knowing.
But, nonetheless, if you look forward, and you look at Obama's whole character, who do you think is going to help reconcile the races more in this country than Barack Obama? Very few people.
So I think, as someone, you can say, "Obama went to this church." You wonder why he went to this church. What kind of statement was he making?
Nonetheless, if you take the totality of his life, this is a guy who's built it around reconciliation.
JUDY WOODRUFF (News Hour Anchor): So the timing here -- well, Mark?
MARK SHIELDS (Syndicated Columnist): And Barack Obama would not be the first person to have gone to a church and not heeded what was said in the pulpit. I mean, many of us do it every week. We are urged, exhorted for certain behavior, which we never do measure up to, whether it's different behavior from that.
But I do agree with David, that Barack Obama's life is so entirely different from the message of separatism. I mean, he has been the ultimate integrationist.
And that's what his candidacy does represent, really a repudiation of the sense of blacks as victims, that this is a society that has had grave faults and grave shortcomings and grave injustices, but has moved to remedy them and that he, in his career, is an example of that improvement.
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Gas Tax Holiday
JUDY WOODRUFF: This argument they're having this week, David, on the gasoline tax. Hillary Clinton, in effect, on the side with John McCain, arguing this gas tax holiday is a good idea. Barack Obama, on the other hand, saying this is just pandering; it doesn't add up to anything.
Is this affecting what voters think about these candidates?
DAVID BROOKS: Maybe, and, in this case, Obama is absolutely right. I don't know any economists who don't think he's right. I'm sorry to say that McCain has joined Hillary in the axis of opportunism.
It's a sham issue. For McCain, it's horrific, because it's un-conservative in so many ways to give away this little gift, a tiny, little trivial gift, in the middle of the summer of $30 bucks, or whatever it would be a month, to really insult modern economics by assuming that, if you cut the prices, you know, you're going to have increased demand.
We're not going to produce more gasoline because of the refinery problem. It's not going to make a big difference in anybody's pocketbook at the end of the day. It's a sham.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Could it have an effect in Indiana and North Carolina?
MARK SHIELDS: It could, if Obama phrased it differently. Obama has made the argument that David did, which is very thoughtful, logical, cerebral argument.
What Obama ought to do is say: This is the worst of Washington politics. This is what it is. This is bait-and-switch. This is Washington politics at its cheapest. They really think you're dumb. They think you're so dumb that they can buy you off.
We're a country -- everybody who drives a car knows that the roads in this country are in disrepair, that the bridges are in disrepair. What we're going to do is take 300,000 jobs out for this little gimmick of people working because that's where the gas tax goes, to rebuild the highways of this country and to maintain the bridges of this country.
And he ought to do it just on the basis and tie it -- this is the same kind of politics that had a "Mission Accomplished" sign up five years ago, that said there were weapons of mass destruction. That's what's wrong.
Of course, there is much more in the full transcript.
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