Reverend Wright and Obama’s Problem
I was reading through a book, Running on race : racial politics in presidential campaigns, 1960-2000 by Jeremy D. Mayer. Parcing through the racial dimensions of various campaigns, from the splitting and double-backing of your Kennedy through and on, I end up thinking that Jesse Jackson’s 1984 campaign strikes me as particularly loathsome, and this aspect of Clinton’s 1992 campaign served some low points, in the manner that he innoculated himself from any possible Willie Horton effect.
But that is in the past. Flash forward to Obama’s speech yesterday in handling the problem of his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In the past month, John McCain has been scoping out the various nutty right-wing evangelical Christian pastors, notably one John Hagee, and “Whore of Babylon” to you too. In electoral terms, I found myself biting my tongue with this one, knowing that behind door number one for Obama, from out of Obama’s identity politics searching youth to assert his essential blackness, was Reverend Wright and this church. Not without his merits, but also not without its dark corridors, somewhere lurking beside your Louis Farrahkan.
The problem here is that in a contest of religious and cultural nutcasery in the public scope, Obama is going to lose on this score. The racial edge is too strong — I go back to the several seconds of b-roll where two burly black men pop into view — the “Amen!” chior throwing their hands down, which to clarify the meaning of that post, this image, whatever words Wright is saying muted, in itself is strikingly innocuous even if it is scary looking to white America and even as the media seems to want to burnish it into the public’s retina– and we have somehow come as a nation to accept the constellation around Pat Robertson into mainstream electoral politics. Besides which, Obama has a sustained relation with Wright; McCain just wants a bunch of symbolic huggings.
I admit to being cynical and jaded with regard to Obama and his speechifying, thinking too often there’s just no there there. So with that in mind, I was prepared for Obama’s poetic eloquence with yesterday’s speech, expecting to fall into my cynicism, and…
… It was just about the finest product of any politician in this century. This, I guess, is that famed eloquence everyone talks so much about in service of Substance, the parsing out of the fissures of our nation’s racial discombobulation.
So I liked it. I thought it answered the question. But I am not necessarily John Q Public. How did it play in Peyoria? My pundit game of guaging mass opinion fails me on this one. And I don’t think John Q Public can necessarily provide an answer. This morning, I saw some AP poll results asking various ethnic groups if they had a “favorable” or “unfavorable” opinion of other ethnic groups, and I had to shake my head — what a completely and utterly useless and unanswerable poll. The poll answers is going to be that 4 percent view another ethnic group unfavorably — but this matter does not work that way. A better guage, for Obama’s problem, goes along the lines of what percentage of voters believe he is Muslim.
I can only suggest that this speech played better in Peyoria than any other tact Obama may have gone with — whether with political cynicism or with his whole heart. I note the ripples from the National Review’s “Corner”, where your bloggers have shifted out the one positive review admist a whole mass of kvetching — too much victim politics, where’s the forth-right condemnation and disassociation of Wright, etc.? The problem is that Wright sits there, undeniably, and there is not extracting him from the historical record of Obama’s life.
Overall I will say this did Obama better than Mitt Romney’s Mormon speech did him. Not saying I can calibrate the political slidings here, but this will end up being judged an act of brilliance based on the simple fact that he will likely be the nominee and likely the next President, and that is how these things are judged.