We sometimes ask, how could he have sat in those pews for 20 years, soaking all that in? How could Obama ally with, and take instruction and succor from, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? Similarly, how could he have been friends with Ayers and Bernadine (his equally violent and totalist mate)? These questions are not just “right-wing talk radio” mischief. They are good and worthy and perplexing ones.
And, in my previous post, I said there has never been a satisfactory explanation for Bill Clinton’s commutation of Susan Rosenberg’s sentence. There has certainly never been such an explanation from Clinton and his people, of which I’m aware. But David Horowitz gave me a pretty good explanation: A lot of those ’60s liberals, like Bill and Hillary Clinton, hold themselves cheap for not being a bit more radical. They donned coats and ties, or dresses (or pantsuits), and got good jobs and maintained respectability. They worked “within the system.” But they might have looked with longing at the real radicals, the “liberals-in-a-hurry,” who actually went out and bombed and otherwise wrecked.
That is as good an explanation as I think we’ll ever get.