Redstate

The embattled candidate goes back to the same well with supporters, then tries to present a different face to the general public

By Jeff Emanuel Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Politics as usual | Rev. Jeremiah Wright | Sister Souljah — Comments (14) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

The sudden return of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's pastor and spiritual mentor for over two decades, to the media spotlight this past week has sparked anew the debate over the true extent and effectiveness of Mr. Obama's actions to deal with the growing thorn in the side of his campaign that his former friend has become.

Wright's interview last week with Bill Moyers, in which he undercut the entire rationale for the Obama candidacy by referring to Mr. Obama's statements and actions on the campaign trail as simply being "what politicians do," caused the harsh spotlight of several weeks ago to be re-shone on Rev. Wright and his relationship with Mr. Obama, whose judgment, beliefs, and willingness to stand up for what he claims to believe in.

The intensity of that spotlight increased exponentially with Wright's addresses to the National Press Club and to the NAACP, in which he -- among other outrageous statements -- equated the U.S. flag with the flag of al Qaeda, berated "white America" for its failure to confess the sin of racism, reiterated his claim that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus to eradicate the African-American community (a charge about which CNN actually contacted the Center for Disease Control on Monday for an on-the-record comment), and declared -- complete with mocking vocal imitations -- that the black and white races differ genomically, with each being programmed to primarily use a different side of their brain.

The damage done to the Obama campaign is still being calculated, obviously, and new theories are popping up across the spectrum about why Wright chose now to re-enter the spotlight, and whether Mr. Obama's actions to date to deal with this issue, including a press conference this afternoon, will be effective.

Read on.

"The Obama campaign and its appendages have set back racial relations a generation," wrote Victor Davis Hanson at National Review Online. "Just ten years ago, any candidate, black or white, would have rejected Wright making a speech about genetic differences in respective black and white brains. Now it's given to civil rights organizations by the possible next President's pastor and spiritual advisor — and done to wild applause for an organization (the NAACP) founded on the idea that we are innately the same, while being gushed over by ignorant 'commentators'."

So how does the post-partisan, post-racial candidate deal with this? The absurdly extreme nature of Rev. Wright's statements at the National Press Club and to the NAACP prompted some to accuse Wright, either for self-promotion or for revenge, of purposely trying to torpedo Mr. Obama's candidacy. Newsweek's Joe Klein, for example, wrote that "Wright's purpose now seems quite clear: to aggrandize himself...and destroy Barack Obama."

However, a second theory entered the discussion at the beginning of this week: that Wright, secretly working with the Obama campaign, could be making these increasingly racist and outrageous statements for the purpose of making it easier for Mr. Obama, who claimed a personal inability to disavow Rev. Wright in his March speech in Philadelphia, to finally (and forcibly) cast Wright aside, in a move akin to Bill Clinton's 1992 repudiation of hip-hop activist Sister Souljah, and move on with his campaign unencumbered by the specter of the Chicago preacher.

"The Obama campaign might like to abandon Wright now as a way of reaching out to white, rural, working-class Democrats," wrote RedState Contributor Mark I in an email Monday. He continued:

But the post-partisan politician can't be seen to be a flip-flopper. That would be too opportunistic, too "old politics."

So the solution is to have Wright go out and make more outrageous comments, maybe amplify his original ones which had started to fade from the news. That would give Obama the cover to denounce him now, based on his new remarks, without appearing to cave in to political pressure.

National Review Online's Jim Geraghty concurred with the possibility that Mr. Obama could be setting himself up "for the all-time Sister Souljah moment," writing that Wright's current track "gives Obama the opportunity to finally sever the ties. A statement like, "I loved this man, but I cannot abide what he is saying now... I am leaving that church and must disavow Jeremiah Wright." Issue resolved. Obama is given credit for being a healer, for a courageous move, for standing up against divisiveness at great personal emotional expense, etc."

Pejman Yousefzadeh pointed out that Mr. Obama needed to do something further to fix the ever-larger issue of Rev. Wright, as a means of both solving the problem that Wright's comments are causing in light of Mr. Obama's lengthy mentor-mentee relationship with the preacher, and of demonstrating that Mr. Obama can, in fact, stand up to those who engage in speech and acts with which he disagrees.

"The Obama people officially have a problem," Yousefzadeh wrote. "Now would be a really good time for a speech by Obama telling Wright to take a hike. After all, leaders are supposed to stand up to demagogues, aren't they?"

This afternoon, Mr. Obama held a press conference at which he addressed Rev. Wright's latest comments. At the appearance, he called Wright's statements "a bunch of rants that aren’t grounded in truth," continuing:

The person that I saw yesterday was not the person I met 20 years ago. His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate. I believe they do not accurately portray the perspective of the black church. They certainly don’t portray mine. If he considers this political posturing, then he doesn’t know me very well. And I don’t know him well either...It’s not what America stands for. Rev. Wright does not speak for me. He doesn’t speak for our campaign. I can’t prevent him from making these outrageous remarks…When I say I find these statements appalling, I mean it…Makes me angry and saddens me.”

Unfortunately, Mr. Obama's "repudiation" of Wright's most recent statements, and his contention that Wright is a different person now than he during the twenty years that Obama was attending his church, rings incredibly hollow. As Michelle Malkin, who live-blogged the press conference, wrote:

Let’s be clear then: It wasn’t the fact that Wright has been spewing this same recycled crap for years that finally got Obama mad. It was that he finally realized it was hurting his campaign. And he was personally miffed by Wright’s insults against him.

Though Mr. Obama finally said these things in public that he had either refused (or been too cowardly) to say, or hadn't really thought, for the last twenty years, today's press conference was far from being a "Sister Souljah moment." First, unlike Bill Clinton, Mr. Obama did spend two decades sitting in the pews of Trinity Church and listening to Rev. Wright's sermons, taking his children along for the last several -- not to mention donating tens of thousands of dollars to help support the preacher's efforts.

Further, until they gained more realization on Tuesday regarding the extent to which Rev. Wright's latest tirades stood to hurt them politically, the Obama campaign, clearly believing that their previous actions in dealing with the Wright issue had paid sufficient dividends, had been going back to the exact same well they drew water from when attempting to douse this same fire in March -- literally.

Yesterday morning -- timed, purposely or coincidentally, within mere hours of Rev. Wright's speech to the National Press Club -- the Obama campaign sent an email to supporters in which they offered, in exchange for a small donation, a "limited-edition DVD and print" of Mr. Obama's March speech (entitled "A More Perfect Union") addressing Rev. Wright, Trinity Church, and race in America.

In that speech, Mr. Obama refused to throw his longtime friend and counselor under the proverbial bus, instead claiming that the white majority in this country couldn't understand Wright's anger and hate-filled comments because they weren't black, and lacked the formative experiences that made men like Wright what they were.

Whether out of a deep, abiding agreement with the message offered by Wright, or out of a sense of obligation to the black-church pastor whose early tutelage and endorsement helped the racially-mixed Obama gain the "street cred" he needed to gain Chicago public office, Obama refused to denounce Wright, saying "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community."

In his Tuesday press conference, he attempted to publicly make up for that lack of a denouncement -- while still hawking DVDs of the March speech in which he refused to do so.

Far from a "Sister Souljah moment" indeed.