The Daily Caller found a previously uncirculated Barack Obama speech from 2007, and the conservative media has been giving it the “47%” treatment. No wonder. The speech is uncommonly ugly, with the future President channeling Rev. Wright and Kanye West, encouraging black anger and racial hate. Needless to say, he does not sound like a leader of “all the people” here.

I am on record as believing that such partisan audience speeches should be taken for what they are, and thus with several grains of salt, but never mind: the standard, a different one, has already been decreed by the mainstream news media, which treated Mitt Romney’s unscripted remarks about the government-dependent “47%” as more significant than the collapse of Obama’s foreign policy, the negligent death of our Ambassador, and a protracted White House cover-up of a terrorist attack. If they want to aspire to any fairness and even-handedness at all, it should devote a similar amount of attention and outrage to Obama’s remarks to black clergy, which were, in my view, far worse, because they were designed to exploit racial fears and divisiveness. They are also, like Romney’s comments, misleading and unfair.

I could argue that it is more reasonable to focus on Obama’s speech, because it was made in public, and presumably was fair game for criticism at the time. Why didn’t the reporters who witnessed it raise any alarms then? Wouldn’t such a racially divisive speech during the campaign (for the nomination) be at least as newsworthy in 2008 as the “47%” line by Romney 2012? Of course not—because the media was trying to elect Obama then, and it is trying to defeat Romney now.

Don’t be silly.

But that can’t excuse the media’s burial of the 2007 speech now: not after committing itself to the position that remarks tailored to extreme and narrow “base” groups should be used to alienate everyone else. Obama even adopted a phony black dialect for his speech; at least Romney didn’t make his remarks while doing an imitation of Thurston Howell the Third. If ill-considered comments that strike at the raw nerves of many Americans are to be the criteria for media criticism of Presidential candidates, Obama’s comments qualify at least as much as Romney’s gaffe. Again, from my perspective, more. Why? Because the accusation that the Katrina response by the Bush Administration was racist (rather than just plain botched) is one of the most scurrilous slurs I have heard in decades of watching political combat, perhaps the most. Here is what I wrote about it in 2005:

“The accusation that the delays in rescue efforts were due to racial bias has to be one of the most irresponsible, malicious and frankly stupid examples of race-baiting in the long history of that irresponsible, malicious and stupid below-the-belt political tactic, and anyone who participated in spreading it deserves universal condemnation. First and foremost, there is no evidence of this at all. The fact that a majority of the poor who were trapped by the hurricane were black and the fact that rescue efforts were slow does not add up to proof of intentional discrimination, and saying otherwise does not change the equation. Nobody is charging the mayor of New Orleans with racism, though he stuffed thousand of African-Americans into the Superdome without adequate food or toilet facilities and never attempted to evacuate poor blacks with city buses. Of course, he is African-American. So the thrust of the racism argument is that when an African-American local official makes a mistake in a crisis, it’s just a mistake, but if a Republican administration makes a mistake, it is really part of a bigoted conspiracy.”

“Now that’s racism.”

I might cut some slack to the critics in the emotional times that these comments were made, and also discount them a bit because of the caliber of those who made them, like West, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, plus media hacks like CNN’s thankfully sacked Aaron Brown. But had I known that candidate Obama had repeated these baseless and hateful charges to a black audience in 2007, two years after they were dismissed by  fair and reasonable Americans as slander, I would have considered him self-disqualified as a potential Chief Executive, especially one who would later pledge to eschew racial politics.

All, right, Obama’s been President for four years. We can judge his leadership; we can judge his policies and their results; his promises and their pay-off. I think a speech in which he was sucking up to black ministers is a distraction now, just as a fund-raising speech Romney made to fat cats was a distraction. I don’t make the priorities and standards, though: the news media does. I would expect the news media to follow its priorities and standards, foolish and unfair as they are, with both candidates, if, that is, they were committed to being even-handed and objective.