Cynics ask if Obama-Wright drama is election theater?
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
If Barack Obama is as tricky as this writer and fellow columnists Thomas Sowell, Michelle Malkin and Linda Chavez think he is (see following pages), he now owes Reverend Wright a big one for cooperating.
Otherwise, the Obama campaign has one giant loose canon rumbling around out there.
Obama’s surprising and sudden public separation from his pastor of 20 years, literally overnight from Monday to Tuesday, might be on the level – might be!
It might also be “what politicians do” – as Reverend Wright himself put it the week before in explaining why Obama yanked him from a ministerial role as the campaign was starting last year.
It hasn’t been too long since candidate Obama was vowing that he could never disown his pastor anymore than he could disown his black community, no matter what the minister had said from the pulpit for two decades.
Wright’s preachments have included that the U.S. government invented the AIDS virus to wipe out black citizens and a prayer that “God damn America” for the white man’s policies, the later comment coming just after 9/11 when terrorists killed 3,000 innocent people.
We make Obama’s supposed exit from Reverend Wright as a superb dog and pony show, put on by an agreeable supporter to try to help a candidate starting to slip badly among white working class voters.
That would make it Obama’s “Sister Souljah” moment – after Bill Clinton’s acclaimed public repudiation of an extremist black singer. The timing came at a critical stage to shore up white support for the Clinton campaign.
Until Obama’s sudden disowning, he was hailing his pastor as a pillar of the black religious community, not just in South Side Chicago but nationally.
Clinton could afford to dump on Sister Souljah, an easily expendable entertainer. For Obama, Reverend Wright, with his black liberationist following, is another matter. Without the minister’s backstage approval for this bit of election theater, Obama might be seriously damaged.
As recently as Monday evening, Obama was still brushing off Reverend Wright’s long pattern of hate speech as old news, a problem that was strictly Wright’s to deal with, and a thing that had nothing to do with Obama since he had already explained everything. That according to Andrea Mitchell, an MSNBC reporter-pundit, who said she was present and heard the comments directly from Obama.
Then bingo, there was the candidate the next morning, claiming he had not “vetted” his pastor, spiritual adviser and mentor – vetted, as in investigated thoroughly. How could Obama have missed the elephant in the room during two decades of rants from the pulpit and on CDs distributed in the church lobby? And from the man who had married the Obamas, baptized their children, was a close friend and to whose churchly causes the Obamas donated large sums?
Obama’s record of bad judgments and bad associations, some brought to light only recently, have cost him among white voters. Pennsylvania was his hit alongside the head.
But much as he needs to play to white people, he cannot afford to lose even the splinter of black support that a really, really angry Reverend Wright could take away. Losing even 10 percent of the black vote in North Carolina, a state with a heavy black population, could swing that state toward Hillary Clinton. Black people sympathetic to Reverend Wright could also hurt Obama in Indiana, the northern part of which falls within the Chicago media market, and in other primaries ahead.
Reverend Wright is said by the media to be a canny businessman. He built a small, struggling church into a major force in the religious and political life of Chicago’s predominately African-American area. Revenues flowing from that acumen were enough to allow the congregation to donate a $10 million home in a pricey white area for its retiring minister.
So credit Reverend Wright with the ability to think strategically and the smarts to realize that extreme political illness for Obama requires an extreme remedy.
During the past weekend, he seemed to court Obama’s rebuke, choosing high-profile settings to make his points and defend some of the most egregious and bizarre of his utterances. One speech came at the National Press Club; the other before an audience of the NAACP.
Immediately, liberal media types, notably MSNBC pundits, were falling all over themselves with analysis that Reverend Wright has lost his senses and wants to bring Obama down.
Has he? Does he? Really?
May 2008
