Obama's honeymoon is on the rocks

Barack Obama’s honeymoon with the media may well be over.

His rhetoric has turned into a double-edged sword which took him to great heights because of its regular man soaring possibilities, but has now become the kind of cryptic, almost Clintonian kinds of answers to troubling questions that leave us as a nation feeling unfulfilled.

For a man with an oratorical gift like the Senator, and one who constantly talks about clearness, and transparency, he missed a great opportunity portraying those qualities by not telling us what “earlier controversial comments” he had heard his pastor Jeremiah Wright utter. The fact that he understates the controversy of Wright’s remarks as simply a “distraction” instead of a defining moment that could help people trust him or not is an error in judgment for a man with a considerable intellect.

People walk away from that answer with a feeling that this is the same old political hack who holds an arrogance that we have seen emanating from Washington for years -- the same Washington that Barack Obama is trying to distance himself from, and the type of political hack he constantly criticizes.

Add to that the tortured oral bumbling in trying to explain how an association with William Ayres, a bombing member of the Weather Underground is nothing more than a “manufactured issue” and you have a candidate whose high-flying words have been grounded, at least for the moment.

It seems to me that what will raise his message back up is clear and plain talk about all issues, whether he thinks they are important or not. I’m Gary Sutton.