Wright and Wrong
Granma always said no good deed goes unpunished. 
Just ask Barack Obama. He went through some painful contortions to not toss Reverend Jeremiah Wright off a pier last month and, instead, made his rather wonderful speech about race.
His payback? Reverend Wright's rather horrifying, national magical mystery tour that erupted Monday at the National Press Club. Indulge my atheistic take on all this, but I suppose this is what happens to folks who claim (or worse who actually believe) that God speaks to them. It sort of inflates one's ego. And in the case of Rev. Wright, his is apparently the size of a larger-than-average aircraft carrier. He'd rather spend three days aggrandizing himself and blowing holes in the campaign of America's first viable black presidential candidate than he would keeping his trap zipped.
There are a few, like Chris Beam at Slate, who argue that Wright's circus-like performance will somehow, in the long run, benefit Obama. But I think not. Part of Obama's appeal has been his posture and promise of being a healer, of representing a new type of cross-racial, if not post-racial, politics.
Wright, on the other hand, seems dipped and anodized in an old-school and highly racialized paranoia. It's one thing to publicly sermonize against the hypocrisies and outrages of U.S. foreign policy and the inequities that are the historical residue of slavery and Jim Crow. But it's quite another to start arguing that the same American government has conspired to infect the the nation's black communities with AIDS.
What's Obama gonna do? What should he do? Wright's torpedo run has yet to terminate, so heaven knows what he's going to say in the next few days to come. I could be wrong, but I find it difficult to believe that the furor restarted in the last 24 hours is going to dissipate before next Tuesday's key primaries in North Carolina and Indiana. It seems unlikely that Obama can passively sit back and let Wright continue to yap unchallenged. I think he has little choice now but to publicly decapitate the Rev.
April 28th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
This is a literary moment. Like Shakespeare’s Henry IV pt. 2. Will Obama reject Wright like Hal rejected Falstaff upon becoming king? ( “I know thee not, old man…”) Will he be able to commit this callousness and hypocrisy in order to clinch the presidency? Obama may have what it takes to be president. Does he have what it takes to win the presidency?
April 29th, 2008 at 5:18 am
Well, what do you know…. Enthusiastic Hillary supporter organized Rev. Wright talk to Press Club
April 29th, 2008 at 5:33 am
Glad you wrote this post. I was reading about Wright’s recent comments las night and concluded that Obama has to just obliterate any connection with this guy in the strongest possible terms.
Wright is about to destroy the gains made from the most impressive political speech I’ve ever seen. He’s threatening to destroy the candidacy of the only viable black candidate ever in 200 years of presidential elections. And he’s proving to be deeply and destructively cynical.
It obviously carries some risk, but to do nothing with this carries far greater risk. It could kill Obama’s campaign. Plus, on the calculating, political side, it gives Obama a chance to show some real salt–to display a bit of fire which he could really use right now. A pretty incendiary speech about Wright’s cynicism could be used as a vehicle to take a few swipes at Hilary to condemn the whole politics of cynicism and hypocrisy as it currently plays out in our electoral politics.
This may be another chance for him to give a thrilling speech, but he has got to get some people bloody, and he has to do it now.
April 29th, 2008 at 5:55 am
“My spiritual mentor, my politcal advisor, my pastor of twenty-three years, that man who baptised my children, who married me; that man is a complete tool, a total nutjob, an ass, a demagogue who traffics in rancid doctrines, racial hate, and bizarre conspiracy theories.
What was I thinking?”
Indeed, Barack. Barack were you thinking? America wants to know.
April 29th, 2008 at 5:56 am
I man: what were you thinking?
April 29th, 2008 at 5:56 am
Damn. I mean: I mean
April 29th, 2008 at 6:55 am
“I think he has little choice now but to publicly decapitate the Rev.”
You couldn’t be more correct. If he doesn’t he’s toast and deserves to be.
I’ve supported his unwillingness to lash out so for (at HRC, the MSM, McCain etc.). It showed dignity, poise and proved that the basic ratinale for his campaign, risung above politics as usual, was sincere — it was him , not just a slogan.
But now, especially given the malice involved in Wright’s press club performance, the far-reaching implications (like goodbye nomination) Obama’s got to show some righteous wrath. I’m not sure he needs to decapitate, but he needs to address with force and feeling the Rev’s implication that he’s so far denounced Wright’s words in his role as ‘politician’ but that somehow he secretly agrees with the Rev’s agenda. He’s got to make it clear that he denounces that whole notion, and distance himself specifically and in no uncertain terms from the most egregious of the claims that Wright made yesterday (all of them intended to bloody Obama, whom I guess Wright views as an ingrate and probably envies). This can’t be done with an air weariness, regret that he has to perform such tasks. He’s got to do it with gusto.
The funny thing is, if Wright had just sought to rehabilitate his name he could have gone a long way toward doing so with the Moyers appearance. The intelligence and reasonableness he showed there makes it all the more clear that he knew just what he was up to in the toxic, stomach-turning performance at the press club.
April 29th, 2008 at 7:10 am
Good catch, Woody. Errol Louis is one the most credible and fair commenters on politics for the Daily News.
April 29th, 2008 at 7:19 am
The video you’ve got posted, which is opening remarks, is unexceptionable and quite reasonable stuff. If folks want to see the off-the-cuff Q&A stuff that comes off as wildly over-the-top, glib, flip, etc., go here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/28/jeremiah-wright-at-nation_n_98949.html
April 29th, 2008 at 7:41 am
Dan O -
Exvellent comment.
There really is nor risk — it’s all reward. If he doesn’t pull it off — and it’ll be a hard trick — he’s no worse off than he is now, sinking fast, with the millstone of Jeremiah Wright tied to his neck.
April 29th, 2008 at 8:15 am
I think i’ve been cast to the seven seas of rye. But I’ll say briefly what I said in a comment that hasn’t appeared: On a certain level, Wright is doing the right thing - if like me, Wright beleives that the US system is iredeemable, than some phony like his turncoat pal Obama should be destroyed…this is probably Wright’s Leninist perspective.
April 29th, 2008 at 8:18 am
Here’s a good post on the right reverend:
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/04/crabs-in-the-barrel.php
April 29th, 2008 at 8:19 am
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people
April 29th, 2008 at 8:26 am
” if like me, Wright beleives that the US system is iredeemable”
He, unlike you, probably doesn’t fully believe that. At least the Rev Wright on Moyers doesn’t. The jerk at the press club yesterday knows that signs this country is redeemable such as BHO gaining the nomination would undermine his own politics of grievance, which is why BHO must be stopped.
April 29th, 2008 at 8:38 am
” i’ve been cast to the seven seas of rye”
Nice image but what does it mean?
April 29th, 2008 at 8:44 am
I have no clue if its a real mythical concept, but its a song on Queen’s second album with which lyrically it means something akin to Hades.
April 29th, 2008 at 8:47 am
Why would BHO be anything redemptive? I support him foursquare against the right, btu he is just another centrist who is reaping the whirlwind of dissing his radical friends.
April 29th, 2008 at 9:04 am
Obama need to amputate, cauterize, and disinfect. My feeling of the man is that he is for too passive to do so.
April 29th, 2008 at 9:50 am
Both Clinton and Obama should drop out and give their delegates to John Edwards if they want the Democratic Party to win back the presidency in November. I predicted as far back as 18 months ago that this would happen if Edwards - the only Democrat alive with a sure shot of winning - did not get the nod. Only in this instance, I hate being right. Four more years on the wrong track is going to be hell on all of us, and it is the fault of the inflated egos of Clinton and Obama.
April 29th, 2008 at 10:27 am
David, where you are wrong is that you assume that the main objective of the DP is to win. To the extent that the reasons you like Edwards are factually correct, he is not acceptable to the party’s funders. General Motors doesn’t care which TV network is number one as long as they all run GM’s ads, and Health Point doesn’t care which party wins as long as they both protect the insurance business.
HRC is a sure general election loser, and now Obama is looking like a loser too. If the string-pullers of the party put winning first they would have made her drop out a long time ago and made him quit this morning. That’s just not how it works.
April 29th, 2008 at 11:03 am
Good post, Marc.
And MarkC: “This is a literary moment.”
No kidding. I was looking for the perfect Shakespearian analog when I was thinking about it last night, but had to retreat to the Greeks and a horrible reverse-Oedipal tale.
April 29th, 2008 at 11:04 am
[…] appearance at the National Press Club than meets the eye. BLOGFATHER Marc Cooper also has a good post on the subject. Bookmark […]
April 29th, 2008 at 11:32 am
Obama just held a press conference to express his shock at learning that his pastor and spiritual mentor of 23 years is an asshole.
April 29th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
There is nothing inflammatory in the clip you posted. I doubt the commenters here are as insane and racist as this appears but I don’t get it.
April 29th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Celeste -
As Todd Gitlin says at TPM — “The father has turned on the son–it’s the Laius complex in action.”
April 29th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Or its the phony hypocrite son who turned on the father. Both are true, depending on which lens one uses.
April 29th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
cummings: birthday cakes and fire hazards, remember?
What would it take for someone to be pure enough for you?
The answer to that question is obvious, and leads to two other conclusions; your’re incurably impractical, or (possibly and) you fundamentally misunderstand American politics. I know you probably think you get it in kind of a wised-up way better than those of us who live in it, but your demands for purity say otherwise.
April 29th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Stu, given that all of these facts about Obama and his incendiary minister have just now been trickling out, rather than 6, 7, 8, or 18 months ago; is evidence that you might not be too far off in your belief.
What a dilemna now. Obama probably has a lock on the popular vote and the delegate count; if it comes down to the superdelegates overturning the will of the electorate, I can see millions (especially African-Americans) sitting home in November, and for perhaps an entire generation. On the other hand, if Obama does get the nomination, it will be a virtual cakewalk for McCain in November.
I respect Reg, and for that reason I will decline to cut and paste from the archives all of those predictions he made last year of winning working class whites in the heartland. If he can’t win the support of staunch Democrats in rural and small town Pennsylvania, there is no way he will win any swing votes in my state, or any state here in the midwest as a presidential nominee…as I stated time and again.
April 29th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
And of course I was referring to Obama in that last paragraph.
April 29th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
There’s still a long way to go, but the only surefire loss for Dems at this point is if the supers hand the nomination to Hillary without her having won at the very least a majority of votes in the legitimate primaries and caucuses. It rips the Democratic Party apart at the seams. This is the only thing I’d state as a certainty at this point.
I also think people are getting more than a bit hysterical. Obama’s beaten two Clintons in the primaries - and most likely will continue to. He can take down McCain. The notion that Obama can’t win any state in the midwest is what we like to call “out-of-touch” in this electoral season. That’s absurd.
April 29th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Interesting tidbit from Time magazine:
“But while Wright is a theologian, a teacher and a pastor, he is ultimately a performer. In front of a cheering crowd of supporters that included a whistling Cornel West, he gave into temptation and lustily went after his critics. ”
Cornel West! Groovy!
April 29th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
Evets: ““The father has turned on the son–it’s the Laius complex in action.”
Okay, that works. (Hey, at least we’ve got the right terminology now.)
April 29th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Hark, doth one hear the slightest decrease in inevitablity of the Obamamessiah from brother reg?
Nothing like his mediocreness throwing Wright under the bus to get reg out a-spinin’ and hopin’ agin hope!
April 29th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
I was merely pointing out different lenses, Dan-O, and I have stated that I am foursquare behind Obama. I was merely pointing that this had all the elements of tragedy, in that both antagonistic poles are logically consistent. I agree that on one level that Wright fucked Obama, just as Obama fucked Wright. That said, my views are far closer to Rev.
Wright’s.
Pure enough? Edwards was far purer, as far as I’m concerned than Obama.
April 29th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
I completely understand American politics. Americans have filters that give them a sense of, dare I say, false conciousness, in that they are freaked out by Wright because deep down, no matter how much they disavow what he says, he speaks the truth, nevermind the showboating and AIDS conspiracies. It freaks Americans out to hear that their country is not just mistaken in its actions, but fundamentally and deeply wrong by any moral standard. All Americans know this on one level, Rightwing Christians sublimate it and place the wrongness onto a certain coastal (Jewish) elite that wants to take prayer out of schools. Liberals put it on these Christians. But neither really looks deep enough into America’s black soul and knwos the inarguable fact that America is not, and has not been at least since the second world war, a force for anything but what theoligians cal “Evil”.
Americans are freaked out by that, because they are intelligent and deep down they know its true. So they keep themselves doped with religion and sex and tv.
April 29th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
I am disappointed that no one here is exploring Brother Wright’s learned comments before the Detroit NAACP on the qualities of “black” and “white” brains and intelligence.
Obama might yet prove to be a special, transformative case. As a mullato, might he be endowed with the genetic wherewithal to explain the black brained to the white brained, and vice versa?
Or, on the other hand, did Obama twenty long years ago take a cheap “Leftist” shortcut and ally himself with an insane racist? No enemies to the
Left! No enemies with darker pigmentation!
What is Obama going to do about this? Will he make Joe Lieberman his Secretary of State or will he choose Calypso Louie, instead? Will Obama enlist the aid of Bill Ayers to transform the Department of Defense into the Department of Peace?
The only thing I’m not wondering about is who will win the gun-toting Hillbilly vote in ‘08.
April 29th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Jcummings says:
“Americans have filters that give them a sense of, dare I say, false conciousness, in that they are freaked out by Wright because deep down, no matter how much they disavow what he says, he speaks the truth, nevermind the showboating and AIDS conspiracies.”
“Americans are freaked out by that, because they are intelligent and deep down they know its true. So they keep themselves doped with religion and sex and tv.”
Left-wingism in a nutshell. Attribute the opinions of the best-educated, richest Demos from the oldest modern liberal democracy in the history of the world to pure unalloyed stupidity. Engage no arguments.
April 29th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Outstanding! Obama took the gloves off.
Oh, and cummings, your grotesquely reductionist and Manichean view of the world explains a lot. The US is just the hobgoblin foil for all of your dialectical musings. But it’s just fucking patronizing.
The US has a hell of a lot of shame in its history, but we’re not as dumb down here as you might think about these things. We can do the whole two-thoughts-at-once thing every once in a while.
For example, not all of us think Christians are to blame for our transgressions. Some of us manage to puzzle out that it might have something to do with the intersection of money and political power backed up by a noxious strain of economics that wafted out of Chicago. Give some of us some credit every now and then.
Anyway…Go Obama! He is going to crush McCain. Any of you looking at polls today and drawing conclusions about how he will do against McCain are being self-delusional.
April 29th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
“reg out a-spinin’ and hopin’ agin hope!”
Suffice to say that if I were betting hard-earned money on any candidate in November, it wouldn’t be McCain. That’s not spin that ’s realism.
In April of 1992 George H.W. Bush was running 16 points ahead of Bill Clinton. Waffling or whining over polls or “moments” in this campaign - particularly given the deep, deep negatives that the GOP chooses to stick to on issues - is silly. And ahistorical. Taunting me on one bad day for Obama doesn’t make any kind of case for “staying the course” with McBush. And there’s so much baggage lurking in McCain’s closet it’s ridiculous. (How about the McCain family financial disclosure ? What was up with that ?) How stupid do you think Americans are ? Is tangential spin the absolute determinant, rather than core issues ? That’s a sad view of this country. (Do you hate America ?)
April 29th, 2008 at 10:43 pm
Dan O
It is not at all Manichean, since you haven’t even seen a smidgen of my worldview. I was merely pointing out how much of the rest of the planet, including most of my own countrymen see US power. Call it manichean, I don’t see any cogent arguments against the point I make. And I do not attribute stupidity to Americans, I attribute sublimated guilt.
April 29th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
The “doped with religion and sex and tv” comes from Lennon, since I’m a Marxist-Lennonist.
April 29th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
That noxious strain of economics emanated out of English Enclosures over 400 years ago. Capitalism is nothing new. The crisis of the 70s post Vietnam required Chicago neoliberalism to keep western capital afloat. Friedman didn’t invent capitalism.
April 29th, 2008 at 10:54 pm
Quoting Obama (his old friend Edward must be turning in his grave):
“when he equates the United States’ wartime effort with terrorism, then there are no excuses. They offend me, they rightfully offend all Americans, and they should be denounced.”
Can anyone explain to me - I’m being perfectly sincere - how causing the deaths of nearly 20 million people over the last half century is not terrorism? Its worse. As Chomsky puts it, its wholesale terrorism, as opposed to the far less robust spectre of retail terrorism, which certainly has become a threat.
April 30th, 2008 at 7:17 am
Cummings comes to America to exercise freedom of speech he does not have in Canada, all the time kicking, damning, excoriating, and reviling the only country in the world willing to spill it’s on blood and treasure to preserve and spread it for others in the world.
So typical of spoil brats that have been ‘given’ everything and ‘earned’ nothing. I hesitate to respond to this academia damaged 30 year old ’student’, because I know he will insist on having the very last word, as all righteous zealots must, and delay only further the day he may ‘choose’ to graduate and get a job.
It wouldn’t be out of guilt or shame, however. College education is a Human Right, as is just about everything else in Canada………except Freedom of Speech.
April 30th, 2008 at 7:53 am
It really breaks your heart to see the damage done to innocent people by righteous activist leftist zealots embedded into our educational system, and now we’re finding into our inner city churches. The damage is astounding, and almost impossible to turn-around after our young people are exposed to this ‘the world owes you a living’ crap in their schools and churches .
While Wright preaches segregation, racism, avoidance of middle-classness, and you can’t make it in evil and white America, he lives in a million dollar home in a gated white upper middle class suburb with a million dollar budget to spend as he see fit.
But this just isn’t enough. He has a book coming out and the world needs to know about it, even if it means damaging the first chance in 200 years for one of his race to show you can make it in America, if you just stop using ancient history as excuses for failure and f–king try for godshake.
Or maybe it’s the fact Obama is beginning to prove his racist separatist hateful idealogy, that surely will be the premise of his book, WRONG!
April 30th, 2008 at 9:05 am
Cummings comes to America to exercise freedom of speech he does not have in Canada,
No freedom of speech in Canada? Proof?
April 30th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
There are tougher hate speech laws in Canada, I think is the allusion. And I don’t go to the States very often.
April 30th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Jim R. We were in WW2 before you.
April 30th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Quite a difference between that and no freedom of speech.
April 30th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Of course there is, but the right wing likes to conflate Mark Steyn being lectured by a bureaucrat with a lack of free speech.
May 1st, 2008 at 8:55 am
“Canadian Human Rights Act
13. (1) It is a discriminatory practice for a person or a group of persons acting in concert to communicate telephonically or to cause to be so COMMUNICATE, repeatedly, in whole or in part BY MEANS OF THE FACILITIES OF A TELECOMMUNICATIONS UNDERTAKING by means of the facilities of a telecommunication undertaking within the legislative authority of Parliament, ANY MATTER THAT IS LIKELY TO EXPOSE A PERSON or persons TO hatred or CONTEMPT by reason of the fact that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.”
Here it is Randy. This open ended law has been ruled to include the Internet and its blogs as well as printed, the press, communications. Notice one only needs to be deemed ‘likely’ to offend. It is enforced by Human Right Commissions that operate entirely outside the Judicial System. The Act includes search and seizure powers ‘without’ a judges order.
Imagine if you can having a bunch of JCs, who see discrimination around every corner, stacked onto these Commissions using this kind of power. Well this is exactly what they have in Canada.
The abuses are gross and only came to light when a radical Muslim complained to the Commissars that a weekly publication had printed the Mohammad Cartoons, and a daily National Publication, McCleans, had printed excerpts of Mark Steyn’s book “America Alone”.
These two cases are still being adjudicated and they have cause a firestorm of controversy in Canada regarding Free or Speech and Press laws given them in their Charter(Constitution).
Notice how JC wants to play-down the impact of this law, and it activist enforcement by HRCs across Canada, by saying a bureaucrat ‘lectured’ a writer. Not quite. Canada’s HRCs have and use sweeping powers to not only take complaints from citizens, but generate them themselves by trolling the internet, sometimes even logging in an creating hate comments themselves using alias in order to ‘bait’ other commenters.
Finally, they do not ‘lecture’. They have and use their penalty powers to; force the defendant never to ’speak or communicate’ about a subject ruled upon again, force the defendant to pay mental anguise monetary damages, and force the defendant to pay for their own lawyer/legal expenses while the plaintiff’s are paid by the state FREE.
Their conviction rate is 100%! Not by a judge mind you, but by political appointments made to these commissions.
May 1st, 2008 at 11:16 am
While I disagree with the law, I also disagree with the hyperbole. We also have restrictions on freedom of speech here, albeit less than in Canada.