Obama Can't Afford To Be Wright

Barack Hussein Obama has a God problem.  And it's not the one I've written about before, wherein ignorant and incurious Americans -- many of whose votes he's going to need to win the Democratic nomination and general election -- believe he's an unpatriotic Muslim, in large part because of his middle name.  For the sake of argument, let's assume he can overcome that inane storyline over the next few weeks and months and convince the overwhelming majority of the voting public that he is a good Christian and loyal American.  

I'm sure it's exasperating.  It's like trying to convince strangers that you love your mother.  Of course you love her.  She's your mother.  Yeah, but prove it.  You see?  It's tougher than it looks.  However, he's a very smart guy and a gifted communicator -- he might pull it off.  

However, this little tempest that's brewing with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his pastor as well as spiritual advisor of twenty years, could turn ugly fast.  Here are some highlights from a sermon Wright gave in 2006, noted in a Wall Street Journal editorial today written by Ronald Kessler and included in the McCain campaign's packets of news clips it distributes to the press:

"We've got more black men in prison than there are in college," he began.  "Racism is alive and well.  Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run.  No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse (Jackson) and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body."  

Mr. Wright thundered on:  "America is still the No. 1 killer in the world . . . We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional killers . . . We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against Castro and Ghadhafi . . . We put (Nelson) Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there.  We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."

His voice rising, Mr. Wright said, "We supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-Semitic . . . We care nothing about human life if the end justifies the means . . . "

". . . We started the AIDS virus . . . We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty. . ."

Three years earlier he sallied forth with,

"the government gives them (black Americans) the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.'  No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people.  God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.  God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

Never mind that most of what he says is true -- that's irrelevant to the matter.  What is germane is that it's difficult to see how a black candidate, whom some percentage of the public already suspects is Muslim, can win over the hearts and minds of the conservative Democrats and swing Republicans he will need, guided, in part, by a spiritual sherpa who seems to be channeling Malcom X, circa 1964:

"We are Africans, and we happen to be in America.  We are not Americans.  We are a people who formerly were Africans who were kidnapped and brought to America.  Our forefathers weren't Pilgrims.  We didn't land on Plymouth Rock; the rock was landed on us.  We were brought here against our will;  we were not brought here to be made citizens.  We were not brought here to enjoy the constitutional gifts that they speak so beautifully about today.  Because we weren't brought here to be made citizens -- today, now that we've become awakened to some degree, and we begin to ask for those things which they say are supposedly for all Americans, they look upon us with a hostility and unfriendliness."

Malcom spoke those words forty-four years ago and they still resonate today.  But if he had lived, and had preached them last month in a church in Chicago, a church where Obama was a long-time member, they would not have helped Obama's cause.  Anymore than Wright's powerful and moving words are helping him.  For one thing, they call to mind Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan's quasi-endorsement of Obama, a gift he's still trying to return unopened.  There are just too many people happy to jump at the chance to make the specious connection between Obama and Wright's position and, in no time, Pennsylvania voters will be pretty sure that Obama said, "God damn the United States of America," sometime, somewhere back there in a Chicago speech or maybe when he was giving a sermon.  Or something.   

It's a fine line Obama has to walk between telling the truth and telling America what it wants to hear.  Faith and hope are powerful concepts and may yet prove capable of bridging the yawning chasms of race and class and faith that divide this country.  They may prove capable.  But Wright's sermons, if Obama remains unable to separate himself from them, just might sink his candidacy.  It's an open question whether America is ready for a black president.  It's a sure thing they're not ready for an angry black president.

I realize that Obama isn't angry, and he isn't Rev. Wright, and that he has denounced those sermons.  That he has compared Wright to, "an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with."  That's fine.  That's reasonable.  But it may not be enough.  Not for the people whose vote still hangs in the balance.  It's a shame he has to court those votes.  He must feel like Groucho Marx, not caring, "to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members."  But the reality is that he needs those swing votes and, to get them, he must get out in front of this mess. 

 There's an absolutely brilliant piece over at TPM by one of its readers, The Commenter Formerly Known as NCSteve.  It lays out the differences between Obama/Wright and the Clintons/Ferraro.  Which is helpful, as far as it goes.  

But a more accurate comparison is to be made with John McCain and Pastor John Hagee.  Both Wright and Hagee are religious leaders.  Neither speaks for the campaigns.  Both have made extremely incendiary comments about various Americans.  And both have been denounced without being totally rejected by the candidates. 

McCain has taken plenty of flak for parsing his renunciation of Hagee's endorsement.  Given the similarities in the circumstances, isn't it fair to hold Obama to the same standard?  Granted, there is a degree of difference between the two preachers' messages.  That degree being truth.  In Wright's defense, racism is alive and well, we do ignore the Palestinians and we do act supreme.  On the flip side (Hagee's), a good case can be made for the Catholic Church not being "the whore of Babylon," that Hurricane Katrina was not God's judgement upon New Orleans sinners, and that all Muslims do not have a mandate to kill Christians and Jews.

But this isn't about truth, it's about perception.  Obama is running as a unifier.  He can't afford to be put next to Wright's words, pitting blacks against whites, and expect to brush them off as the ravings of an old coot.  Sometimes the truth will set you free.  But sometimes it will wedge you in between a rock and a hard place, too.