The Democratic presidential hopeful showed some steel this week in decisively breaking with his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Well, he couldn’t have been much clearer than that. Barack Obama has thrown his old pastor to the dogs.
In a dramatic press conference this week in North Carolina, Obama said he found Jeremiah Wright’s comments at the National Press Club on Monday ”appalling” and ”ridiculous” and gave a ”performance” with a ”complete disregard for what the American people were going through.” It was ”antithetical” to his campaign and to everything he has stood for as an adult, trying to unite people around common values and aspirations.
Last time around, in his earlier speech in Philadelphia, Obama couldn’t quite bring himself to renounce Wright. This week Obama said he was shocked that Wright would use Monday’s forum to accuse him of political posturing and said very clearly that his friendship with Wright is over. ”Obviously, whatever relationship I had with Reverend Wright has changed as a consequence of this,” he said.
So. Is it enough? In the short term, Obama’s decision to discuss Wright one more time means that the story will stay alive for another day or two. So that might seem a negative. But the story showed every sign of staying alive anyway. In fact, it showed every sign of finishing him off. So having addressed Wright probably does give Obama the chance to stop the bleeding and shift the story in a day or two and move back to talking about the economy.
Another plus: it showed Obama angry and punching back. He’s such a cool and even-tempered figure that one has a hard time imagining him getting worked up over anything (he’s the anti-McCain, emotionally). In political terms, this attribute isn’t a positive; getting angry over important things is not a negative for someone hoping to be president. So it surely helped Obama for people to see him get mad.
But here’s the minus. Still fundamentally unanswered is the question of why Obama stayed in the church for 20 years. Indeed, now that he’s called his former pastor a showboat and a fraud and a demagogic peacock (in not so many words), it could be that that question attains even more saliency.
I don’t doubt, and I think most Americans don’t doubt, that Obama’s views aren’t Wright’s. This point was, really, his main one this week – that anyone who read his books or studied his life or paid attention to his rhetoric or studied the goals of his campaign had to know that Obama’s idea of the United States and view of the world were very different from, and much more benign than, Wright’s. But given that that’s true, his continued membership in the church is still a bit of a mystery.
Maybe it is that he liked the people and the church’s role in the community. Maybe it is true, and I think it surely is, that Wright preached plenty of positive sermons. But I don’t think that Obama’s explanations of this matter will completely seal the deal with most voters.
One question now is whether Wright will return serve. He made it crystal clear this week that he wants Barack Obama to lose this election. Why? Because it would disrupt his view of the US. Wright is in his 60s. He has a view of the US formed by his experience; fair enough. But people in their 60s don’t change their views very much. And if Obama were elected president, Wright would have to change his views about his country, which is something he made explicitly clear at Monday’s National Press Club appearance he will not do: ”I said to Barack Obama last year, ‘If you get elected, November the 5th, I’m coming after you, because you’ll be representing a government whose policies grind under people.”’
And so, psychologically, he needs Obama to lose, because it will affirm him in his righteous view that the US is too racist to elect a black president. So he’ll probably keep after his former friend.
My guess is that Obama gets the benefit of the doubt in that fight, both from the chattering classes and from black voters, who will decide that electing a black president is a little more important than coming to the defence of a man whose life’s work is behind him and who has behaved like an ass.
The Wright problem isn’t over yet. But this press conference put Obama back on the offensive. — Â