What was he thinking?
How can Barack Obama’s pastor of 20 years, the fiery Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a man of golden tongue and lofty ideals, shove his own candidate to the back of the bus? This isn’t a stupid man; this is a man who has the audacity to kill hope.
He’s John McCain and Hillary Clinton’s dream come true.
“G-d Damn America! He now infamously intoned in an old sermon that has been splattered across the airwaves, “Not God bless America. No, no no! G-d Damn America for treating its citizens as less than human! You could just feel the veins popping out on white people’s forehead from sea to shining sea.
It’s been sound bite heaven. There are excerpts of him accusing the government of inventing the AIDS virus as a means of genocide against people of color, or preaching that the US is responsible for bringing the 9/11 attacks upon themselves.
Obama knew how it looked. This was Obama’s spiritual advisor, the man who married him, and baptized his children. Obama took the title of his book, The Audacity of Hope from one of Wright’s sermons.
I can’t think of any politician in all of America who wouldn’t have run – no, bolted – the other way just to distance himself from that kind of political sludge.
But Barack Obama did something extraordinary. After the spit hit the fan, he gave a speech that marked one of the finest moments by any candidate in this campaign.
He knew what it would cost him, but in an address that finally fronted up to the issue of color in America head on, Barack Obama stood by Jeremiah Wright. He did not walk away. And he certainly never ran in the other direction.
Obama spoke about race with a full-throated complexity that America had not heard in decades.
“I can no more disown him [Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love, Obama said.
Reverend Wright went quiet.
The campaign moved on to more scintillating Pennsylvanian inanities like why Obama hasn’t worn an American flag lapel pin to prove his patriotism, or his association with a professor with a radical past from 40 years ago.
Trivial Pursuit anyone?
Until last week: The gleam of the nation’s bully pulpit must have been too hard to resist. This liability wasn’t going away. The Reverend scheduled high profile national press appearances, insisting, “This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright. This is an attack on the black church.
He might as well have been describing sniper fire on the tarmac with Hillary in Bosnia.
This chicken had come home to roost on Obama’s front door, and his squawking had everything to do with one man – Jeremiah Wright, all by himself. This was personal.
Wright was so busy flexing his ego and shadow boxing with the media, the black man he was really punching in the gut was the first one who has a chance to become the next president of the United States.
Republicans are already using excerpts of the preacher in scare-mongering ads. Is actively helping to dive-bomb Obama’s poll numbers on the eve of today’s primaries in Indiana and North Carolina something he will carry back to his black pulpit with pride? Wright took his eye off the prize and shot his own people in the foot. Whose greater good is the Pastor serving now?
Either oblivious or blind to the risk Obama had taken weeks before by standing behind him, the Reverend even called the candidate’s previous comments political posturing. Obama was not amused.
Jeremiah Wright was so busy defending himself as the messenger; he’d completely lost sight of the message. How can we put a black man in that big white house?
There is a fine line between imperfect fidelity and propagating division. This time it was crossed. The Senator did the right thing, a second time. Barack Obama denounced his former reverend, and without hesitation.
With too costly an irony, Reverend Jeremiah Wright lectured to the Washington Press Club last week, before Obama had even made comment, “It is better to be quiet and thought a fool, then to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Maybe the preacher really is a prophet after all.
Tracey Barnett is an American journalist working in Auckland, New Zealand.
