On the one hand, there is Barack Obama, the first African-American candidate with a serious shot at winning the presidency. He has won more states than any other Democratic candidate, won more of the popular vote, has more pledged delegates, and has more money in his campaign coffers. He is an incredibly gifted candidate, perhaps the most eloquent and rhetorically talented politician to seek the presidency in a generation. By any measure, he should already be the Democratic Nominee, yet on several occasions over the last two months, he has failed to win primaries that would have resulted in his decisively securing the nomination.
On the other hand, there is Hillary Clinton. She began the campaign as the overwhelming favorite but has had the unfortunate timing of running against the wunderkind Obama, who has not only won over millions of voters, but the mainstream media as well. Her campaign has been poorly managed, and she has been weighed down by the significant baggage of her time as First Lady and her husband’s controversial presidency. In a year in which voters seem to yearn for change, she failed to anticipate it, fashioning herself instead as the candidate of experience. Yet despite all of this, she remains in the race, and the Democrats have been unable to officially anoint their standard-bearer for 2008.
Even now, it is difficult to see how Obama will not ultimately win the nomination. Why then, can he not close the deal? The answer boils down to one man: The Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. It is hard to imagine there is anyone who has not heard about the Reverend or seen clips of some of his more infamous rants. For anyone somehow unfamiliar, Reverend Wright is the recently retired pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ, which Obama has attended for twenty years. Wright married Barack and Michele Obama, baptized their two daughters, and has in the past been referred to by Obama as his “spiritual advisor” and “sounding board”.
The Reverend Wright was injected into the mainstream in mid-March, when ABC News acquired videos of dozens of Reverend Wright’s past sermons. The material found showed a man prone to incendiary, inflammatory, hate-filled and bigoted comments. In one sermon, he instructed his congregation not to sing “God Bless America”, but rather to say “God Damn America”. In another – on the first Sunday after September 11th, 2001 – he expressed his belief that 9/11 was nothing more than “America’s chickens coming home to roost”. In yet another, he opined that the AIDS Virus had been intentionally created by the American government as a form of “genocide” against African-Americans. And in still another, he referred to the United States as “the U.S. KKK of A.”, a “country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people”.
Obama attempted to put this behind him with a lofty speech in Philadelphia last month. In the speech, he gingerly addressed Wright, and while he expressed his disagreement with Wright’s aforementioned statements and beliefs, he dramatically stated:
“I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother…"He used the opportunity, though, to more broadly -- and with rhetorical beauty -- address the state of race relations in America. With the media’s help, the conventional wisdom seemed to hold that with his speech, Obama had not only diffused the Reverend Wright issue, but that he had actually managed to use it to his advantage.
But Reverend Wright didn’t get the memo, and last weekend, he reappeared with a vengeance. He not only managed to make new controversial statements, he also took the incredible step of reiterating and reaffirming many of the same comments and beliefs that had sparked the media firestorm a month prior. Further, seemingly personally wounded by Obama’s distancing of himself, the Reverend also dismissed much of Obama’s professed disappointment in him as mere" political posturing", the necessary steps taken by “a politician” to placate the electorate. To claim that Obama might simply be just another run-of-the-mill politician flew in the face of the carefully crafted image Obama has used to his great advantage this year. Much of his appeal to voters, after all, has been that he is a fresh face, someone not hardened or made cynical by years in Washington, and someone who promises “a different kind of politics”.
The double-edged sword, though, for a candidate like Obama who presents himself as a fresh face and about whom relatively little is known, is that when any facts or information emerge that may shed light on just who Obama is or just exactly what he believes, those facts or information take on more significance than they otherwise might. For example, a controversial televangelist, John Hagee, endorsed John McCain in the Texas Primary in February. Like the Reverend Wright, Hagee has a history of controversial and inflammatory statements. Some in the media such as liberal New York Times columnist Frank Rich and MSNBC's resident leftist Keith Olbermann are trying to equate McCain's connection to Hagee with Obama's relationship with Reverend Wright. This is likely to be a futile effort because most importantly, there is no long-standing association between McCain and Hagee, and also because unlike Obama, McCain has been a public figure for more than twenty-five years. And while McCain's career has not been free of controversy, he is largely a known quantity, and he has certainly never given the slightest indication that he believes any of the far-flung remarks for which Hagee has rightly been criticized. While this is something of a double-standard, keep in mind that Obama will tout his lack of Washington experience (the reason that so little is known about him) as an advantage, and also will not hesitate to remind voters of McCain's long and very public record for his own political benefit, and already has with his back-handed compliments about McCain's "half century of service" to the country. If Obama wants to run as the "newcomer" with the positives that accompany such a label in this election year, he should also be willing to accept the higher level of scrutiny that ensues.
The most recent Reverend Wright barrage -- including the implicit accusation leveled by Wright that Obama might act or speak out of vulgar political expediency rather than snow-white virtue and integrity -- was apparently too much for the senator to stomach. After a full twenty-four hours without commenting on Wright's latest and greatest, on Tuesday, Obama changed his Philadelphia tune, and seemed to very clearly disown the right reverend. (His grandmother seems to remain in good standing). At a press conference in Winston-Salem, NC last Tuesday, Obama attempted to sever his ties to Wright, telling reporters:
"I am outraged by the comments that [Wright] made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw yesterday. You know, I have been a member of Trinity United Church of Christ since 1992. I have known Reverend Wright for almost 20 years. The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago. His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church. They certainly don’t portray accurately my values and beliefs. And if Reverend Wright thinks that that’s political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn’t know me very well. And based on his remarks yesterday, well, I may not know him as well as I thought either."Obama’s repudiation may have been too little too late, though. Polls show that many voters have serious concerns about Obama due to his association with Wright, Clinton has a solid lead in the once neck-and-neck Indiana polls, and the double-digit lead Obama previously enjoyed in North Carolina is down to less than 10 points. If she wins in Indiana Tuesday, the race for the Democratic Nomination will go on, first to West Virginia on May 13th, then to Kentucky and Oregon on May 20th, Puerto Rico on June 1st, and conclude with Montana and South Dakota on June 3rd. After June 3rd, there will be no further primaries or caucuses. Mathematically, however, neither Obama nor Clinton will have been able to win the number of pledged delegates needed to secure the nomination, leaving the party’s fate in the hands of the superdelegates – nearly 800 current and former elected officials free to support whichever candidate they choose.
Assuming the remaining primaries and caucuses play out as now predicted, it will be very hard for the superdelegates not to throw their support behind Obama – the candidate who will have captured more votes and delegates – lest they be seen as subverting the “will of the people”. What happens, though, if it becomes clear that Obama has been mortally wounded by the Reverend Wright controversy? Does the Wright issue matter, or is it merely a "distraction" as Obama now frames it?
I believe it does matter, and this is a question that I have grappled with since Wright's sermons first emerged in March. At that time, I reserved judgment, but with Wright's repetition of even the most outrageous claims seen in the videos, it becomes harder to believe that the hateful remarks we saw from the sermons were simply "cherry picked" or "taken out of context" as Obama first tried to explain, or that Wright's inflammatory invective could have been such a surprise and shock to him. I also think it is significant because this entire Wright affair speaks to the person Obama is and to the judgment he has -- both quite important in assessing a person's qualifications and readiness to be the leader of the free world.
The question of just exactly who Wright was to Obama must also be asked. How significant a role did he play in Obama's life? How influential was he in Obama's political views? In a Chicago Tribune article in January of 2007, before he had officially announced his candidacy, Obama described the importance of Wright in the following way:
"What I value most about Pastor Wright is not his day-to-day political advice. He's much more of a sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible and that I'm not losing myself in some of the hype and hoopla and stress that's involved in national politics."This implies a relationship and a communication between Obama and Wright that goes beyond spiritual and beyond what might be the expected relationship between a pastor and one of his congregants. Again, this is the man who married Obama and his wife, who baptized their children, and Wright was the very first person he thanked in his victory speech after he was elected to the Senate in 2004. Obama even titled his book, The Audacity of Hope, after the first sermon he ever heard Reverend Wright give.
Yet it seems that from the very beginning of the campaign there was an awareness of the political peril posed by Reverend Wright. Obama has admitted that he uninvited Wright from giving the invocation in February of 2007 when he announced that he was running for president. According to several sources, this was a fairly sudden rescinding of the invitation, and in explaining it to Wright, Obama told him (per Reverend Wright's recollection):
"You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we've decided is that it's best for you not to be out there in public."This implies at least a passing familiarity with the controversial nature of some of Wright's sermons. But when the feeding frenzy surrounding Wright took hold in March, Obama seemed to to downplay how cognizant he was about his former pastor's rhetoric, releasing the following statement:
"The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation."This implies less familiarity. And then several days later in his Philadelphia speech, Obama seemed to offer another version of what he knew about Wright's views and tendencies, saying:
"I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely."But yet he indicated he could not disown the man. So what changed for Obama between his March 18th speech in Philadelphia and his now apparent disowning of the man he'd indicated he was incapable of disowning? After all, there was very little of Reverend Wright's most recent pronouncements that had not already been heard in the series of sermons brought to light in March.
I believe the answer to that question (and also the answer to why Obama waited twenty-four hours before severing ties last week) is that the Obama Campaign saw poll numbers that indicated Reverend Wright was doing serious damage to them, and that a more forceful, angered reaction was necessary to stop his slide in the polls. I also think -- and this is supported by Obama's uninviting Wright from his announcement fifteen months ago -- that Obama and his campaign knew well the danger that his association with Wright represented to his chances for election. I believe that with this knowledge, they took the conscious (but inexplicable) gamble of not heading off the potential controversy by having a very public and decisive break with Wright early on in the campaign. The gamble did not pay off.
So what, then, does all of this tell us about Barack Obama? First and foremost, I think it tells us that he is not as averse or opposed to the tactics and maneuvers of a "typical politician". When poll numbers showed damage, he took the politically expedient path -- just as Hillary Clinton and many other politicians he criticizes for similar actions would have done -- not exactly "a different kind of politics". I also think it tells us that Obama has not been as honest with the voters about Wright as he could have been. At one point he called Wright a political "sounding board", at another his "spiritual advisor", and then when the controversy was swirling in March, he implied far less proximity to Wright and his views. But beyond the changes in Obama's descriptions of just how close he was with Wright is the following question: does anyone really think that someone as intelligent as Obama and as long-associated with Wright and his church as he was would seriously have been unfamiliar with the pastor's outrageous comments? I for one, do not. What does that tell us about Obama's judgment and values?
Since his break with Wright last week, the media have again helped him along by applauding the "forcefulness" of his remarks and the courage it took for him to take that step. The Obama Campaign has tried vigorously to imply that any further discussion of Wright is below-the-belt politics, merely a distraction from the "real issues" that concern Americans. In other words, the Obama Campaign wants to close the door on the Reverend Wright controversy as a campaign issue for good. I suspect this is wishful thinking on their part, especially if he has an unexpectedly poor showing tomorrow. The voters of North Carolina in particular may be the best indicator of whether or not that door is ever capable of being closed.
Therein lies the mess the Democrats may face. Obama is the apparent choice of the people, but if he is thought to be unelectable in November and Clinton is given the nomination by virtue of the superdelegates, the Democratic Party will likely face an implosion. Most immediately, this implosion would manifest itself in the party losing the votes of millions of African-Americans and other Obama supporters in November – and therefore losing the election. In the long-term and more seriously, the inevitable perception that Clinton had stolen the nomination from Obama would be a crisis from which the party would not soon recover – if ever.
So as Tuesday approaches, watch carefully. Clinton will almost certainly win in Indiana, and with an enormous number of African-American voters in North Carolina, Obama should win there. If, however, Clinton somehow wins in North Carolina, Obama will be in serious trouble, the first seeds of a potential Democratic Party apocalypse will have been planted, and John McCain should start buying lottery tickets.
(An abbreviated version of this post can also be seen at Splice Today: http://splicetoday.com/).
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