Comments

1. Nicholas Clifford 04/29/2008 - 9:19 am  subscriber

   Not on Bob Herbert in the NYT, but Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post, and Juan Williams on NPR

   http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90024842

   all saying much the same thing about the Rev. Mr. Wright. But the media (surprise!) keep pandering to him, including NPR.

   Is it too much to suggest that he’s allied with Sen. Clinton? or even (gasp!) Sen. McCain? Though probably, way back in the SC primary, when Bill Clinton made it his business to ensure that everyone knew Obama was the “black” candidate, even he probably didn’t know he’d find such an ally.

2. Ann Olivier 04/29/2008 - 11:08 am  subscriber

   Both CNN and MSNBC had youngish black commentators on last night. Several complained bitterly about Rev. Wright’s egotism and his claim that he represents “the” black church. One said he wants it both ways: he accuses the media of misrepresenting what he said (“God damn America”), but yesterday he claimed that he’s a liberation theologian, and wants to be known as one who tells it like it is, and America needs to be damned. But he complains that the media dumps on him for that too. Another black commentator said that Wright’s feelings are hurt because Obama has rejected him, while another said it is a case of an old man who is very envious of another man’s youth and success. Hmmm.

3. Joe Pettit 04/29/2008 - 12:09 pm

   I wonder if the issue goes deeper than Jeremiah Wright. I worry that this most recent flare up reveals the power of stigma to hold back even someone as accomplished as Barack Obama. For any who might be interested, I try to think the matter through here:

   http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/04/guilty-until-proven-innocent.php

4. David Nickol 04/29/2008 - 2:54 pm  subscriber

   Joe,

   Of course the issue is deeper than Jeremiah Wright, but did anyone expect race would not be a factor in the election of the first black president?

   But if race is a factor, there are other factors, too. I have seen many commentators remark that Obama is still becoming known to the voters. He’s barely served half of his first term in the senate, and many of us are still sizing him up. And many of us, I would also point out, have not been concerned that he doesn’t measure up, but rather that he’s too good to be true!

   I think it is only fair to assume that any candidate who had tied himself so closely to a 20-year associate like Wright is going to be in deep trouble when that associate puts on a performance like Wright has put on the last few days. I can’t find anyone in the news today, no matter how sympathetic to Obama, who is not thoroughly appalled by Wright. I wouldn’t deny that the racial element makes it harder on Obama. But it would still be plenty bad if there were no element of race involved. It looks very much like the man who was going to rise above the fray and bring us all together is being deliberately torpedoed by his own pastor of 20 years.

5. David Nickol 04/29/2008 - 2:57 pm  subscriber

   Joe,

   One more point. Wright has made it much worse by strongly implying Obama is just playing politics and doesn’t mean what he says. Wright could hardly have done more damage if he tried. (Actually, I think he did try. I think he is deliberately trying to hurt Obama.)

6. Joe Pettit 04/29/2008 - 3:10 pm

   David: If you have the time, I would value your reflections on what can be found at the link I provide above. I think his being “unknown” to the voters is putting his difficulties rather mildly.

7. Margaret O’Brien Steinfels 04/29/2008 - 3:11 pm  subscriber  contributor

   Deliberately hurting Obama? I’m not sure I buy that; nor the psychological young man/old man scenario. Like Al Sharpton (see above) and Jesse Jackson, Sr., Rev. Wright can’t seem to resist a camera and a microphone. And then he can’t stop talking.

   This is a tragedy all right, but like many tragedies I am thinking (hoping) it’s unintended. In the Moyer’s interview, Wright said, Obama’s a politician and I’m a pastor. What Catholic politician hasn’t said, I’m a politician and he’s a bishop. Who doesn’t understand that effort at making distinctions?

   Media obsession with flash, racial fears, and swift boat politics! It would be a damn shame if that up ends the Democratic primary.

8. David Nickol 04/29/2008 - 3:45 pm  subscriber

   Joe,

   Actually, I had read your piece on TPM Cafe and was reacting to it. But to be more specific about your main points, I don’t think it’s a matter of “guilty until proven innocent.” Up until quit recently, Obama is not on trial. He’s running for president of the United States, and I think the standard there is “not good enough until proven good enough,” which I think is fair. Choosing a president is not entirely a rational act. One goes by gut instinct as well as reasoned choice. Obama has already beat out Edwards, Richardson, Biden, and Dodd. As far as I am concerned, they were all qualified to be president. It looks like he’s going to beat Hillary Clinton. Whatever trouble he is in now, that is remarkable. I have no doubt that there are many people in the United States who simply will not vote for a black person as president, or find it easier to doubt Obama than they would a white candidate when the going gets tough. But I think the Reverend Wright affair would shake any campaign even without the racial element.

9. David Nickol 04/29/2008 - 4:03 pm  subscriber

   Margaret,

   You said

   In the Moyer’s interview, Wright said, Obama’s a politician and I’m a pastor. What Catholic politician hasn’t said, I’m a politician and he’s a bishop. Who doesn’t understand that effort at making distinctions?

   But Obama said

   “What particularly angered me is his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks was somehow political posturing,” Mr. Obama said. “Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I’m about knows that I’m about trying to bridge gaps and I see the commonality in all people.”

   http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/obama-says-hes-outraged-by-ex-pastors-comments/index.html?hp

   It’s clear that Obama sees as the most damaging of Wright’s remarks the ones about Obama doing what politicians do. It would be a damaging remark even if Obama weren’t campaigning as someone who has put the ‘old politics” behind him.

   It seems to me Wright is striking back because he felt slighted. I find it hard to believe he doesn’t know what he is doing.

10. Grant Gallicho 04/29/2008 - 4:12 pm  contributor

    And who could be behind this?
    http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/04/misleading-robocalls-to-africa.php

11. Margaret O’Brien Steinfels 04/29/2008 - 4:18 pm  subscriber  contributor

    Don’t politicians do what politicians do? They don’t do what bishops and preachers do. Maybe Obama is face to face here with the inevitable dilemma of political life: “dirty hands.”

    His campaign appeal has been to rise above the “old” politics. Am I cynical in suggesting that inevitably the “new” politics is going to have to face the trade-offs, nay-saying, and choices of the “old” politics. That’s what makes politics a difficult but potentially noble calling: doing the most good with the least possible harm (but no guarantees).

    So…. either Wright is saying the obvious, or Obama is taking umbrage at the wrong thing. Or neither of them know what they’re talking about.

    Or, egad, Hillary Clinton is right: Obama need more vetting and toughening up.

12. Margaret O’Brien Steinfels 04/29/2008 - 4:21 pm  subscriber  contributor

    Wouldn’t Obama do better to directly confront those statements about AIDS, etc., with facts.

13. David Nickol 04/29/2008 - 4:56 pm  subscriber

    I am not a political strategist, but what about big ideas, or just ideas, or issues? One would have thought that a change election with two powerhouse candidates duking it out for ever vote they could get would have brought us a battle of big ideas–a bidding war for our votes. The only recent “big” idea seems to be the McCain-Clinton proposal to suspend the federal gas tax for the summer. I think what’s lacking is “the vision thing.”

14. Margaret O’Brien Steinfels 04/29/2008 - 5:44 pm  subscriber  contributor

    Maybe things have gotten too complicated here. I was contesting your point (David Nickol) that Wright’s remark about politicians doing what politicians do was so damaging to Obama. From a certain point of view (mine) knowing that Obama could do what politicians do was a plus. On the other hand, Obama should take his distance from Wright’s crazier fancies, like the AIDS conspiracy. And move on….

15. gene palumbo 04/29/2008 - 10:15 pm

    Take a look at Jim Sleeper’s post on TPMCafé, “Obama in the Wilderness.”
    http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/04/29/obama_in_the_wilderness/#more
    Here are a few excerpts:

    Now you can understand why I wrote Liberal Racism: After 20 years in inner-city Brooklyn, I’d had it watching too many black people and too many white liberals and radicals indulge self-styled “race men” like Jeremiah Wright.
    Certainly I was exasperated by the race men themselves …. countless smart, brave, sometimes grand, but also wounded, raving, preening narcissists who cried “Racism Forever!”….
    Wright himself is a strong, smart, wounded, and angry man who has not carried his pain very well. Who among us would do it better?
    (…)
    Obama’s “Yes we can” speeches summoned memories of those women scrubbing floors, of those scared black churchgoers marching into sunlit Southern courthouse squares, dressed in their Sunday best , shivering in the heat, assured of no safety from federal marshals or God.
    Somehow, they summoned the faith-based courage to reenact the Hebrew Exodus myth against the dogs and mobs: “[T]heir very indifference to the issue of success or failure provided the stamina which made success possible,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1952 of earlier struggles. “Sometimes the heroes of the faith perished outside the promised land.” ….That faith made the protests uncanny and unsettling. King and others opened the hearts of astonished Northern Protestants and Jews whose ancestors had made history of the same Exodus narrative in ages past…
    Where in that epic does Jeremiah Wright stand? Even his glib detractors must grant that he would have been marching into the desert away from the fleshpots of Egypt, and it is that side of Wright that Barack Obama came seeking after college.
    But even as Obama found what he came seeking, he saw the other side, the man who had become embittered in the wilderness. And now, the dead hand of that past lies like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

16. gene palumbo 04/29/2008 - 10:15 pm

    Sorry. I forgot the link: http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/04/29/obama_in_the_wilderness/#more

17. Bob Schwartz 04/29/2008 - 11:23 pm  subscriber

    For Republicans, Wright is the gift that just keeps giving. He may receive a covert medal for his extraordinary efforts.
    Gene Palumbo: Liberal Racism? You truly are my hero. And thanks again for the italics heads up!

18. Joe Pettit 04/30/2008 - 7:54 am

    David: First, let me be clear that I do not have any problem with those who have doubts about Obama’s competence or the wisdom of some of his policy proposals. Nor do I object to him having to prove himself. Of course a candidate for president must do this. However, the point I was trying to make is that what has taken steam out of Obama’s campaign are issues about which it is impossible to have any meaningful public debate, or about which it is impossible for Obama to defend himself decisively.

    I simply find it more than a coincidence that this is happening to Obama to a far greater extent than it is happening to Clinton or McCain. I cannot help but wonder if one reason for this is the posture that many in our country still take toward most black Americans (many, by the way, who would entire reject claims that they are trading in anything close to racism).

    Stigma is pernicious. It can creep into the minds of the most open-minded white people, and certainly even into the minds of many black people in the United States. There seem to me two possible responses to the problem of stigma. First, be vigilant in our self-reflection, rejecting all lines of inquiry that suggest the presence of stigma rather than justifiable conclusions. Second, work to reduce those conditions that produce the difficulties faced by some black people in the United States, difficulties that are assumed to be present in most other black people until proven otherwise.

19. Bob Nunz 04/30/2008 - 11:50 am

    I told my wife this morning that wright reminded me of a Harlem minister I knew long ago who was outstanding in his youth and projects, but as he aged he turned in on himself and his anger, got in trouble with the law ulktimately and passed on . Hence, I found Gene’s link to Jim Sleeper much to the point.
    The race issue will go on then – unfortuinately. I continue to ask where each of us is at in regard to that?
    Also how will this continue to play in the media, especially the mainstream media?
    Finally, I don’t pity Barak Obama, butI find the siuation quite sad: Rev. Wright and his coming apart, those who glefully use him as an ideological oportunity, and those who will not think or rethink deeply the issue of race and how it plays.

20. Ann Olivier 04/30/2008 - 1:44 pm  subscriber

    Bob –

    “The race issue will go on then – unfortuinately. I continue to ask where each of us is at in regard to that?”

    It’s very unfortunate, I think, that this issue has arisen precisely at this time. But if Obama weathers the storm it could be the beginning of a great healing process. The recent discussions on national TV, which is the place where most people get their news and opinions, is like lancing a boil — painful but salutary.

    I have been very encouraged by the seriousness and courtesy of the commentators on the national news channels, except for you know who on Fox. Such dialogue can only be for the good.

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