‘THAT is just terrible, abso lutely dreadful,” a promi nent supporter of Barack Obama said Monday after listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s screed at the National Press Club. He proposed that Obama at long last must denounce his pastor – immediately. It took 28 hours, but he finally did it Tuesday.
Did that solve Obama’s pastor problem? Leading Democrats aren’t sure. His vulnerability transcends ties to a radical preacher. If he’s seen as not just a candidate who happens to be black but as the black candidate in the mold of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, he faces a difficult general-election struggle even if he bests Hillary Clinton for the nomination.
The problem goes back to the reaction crafted by Obama and his strategist David Axelrod about two months ago, when videos of Wright’s racist sermons were circulated. While insisting that Wright’s incendiary remarks were taken out of context, Obama took the high road by delivering a widely praised speech on race March 18. But the issue surfaced again at the Obama-Clinton debate April 16, leading Obama to rule out further debates with Clinton.
His campaign thought the pastor problem had been put to bed until Wright went on his little road tour.
Obama’s danger is being perceived by white voters as representing a hostile, separate culture. NPR reporter-Fox commentator Juan Williams (who’s black), told me: “I never have heard that in church.”
Wright’s demagoguery is so unique in Williams’ view that it was necessary for Obama to separate himself from it two months ago. Williams says Obama should have repented as a “sinner” partaking of lies from the pulpit. It amounted to a post-partisan, post-racial moment lost by the candidate.
The Obama camp feared the worst when Wright went on the road last weekend, but the preacher was restrained at first. Not until the Q&A period at the Press Club did he go wild, playing to a raucous black audience.
Obama adviser Susan Rice, appearing on MSNBC just after that spectacle, was visibly unhappy as she disavowed any responsibility for Wright. Obama hardly seemed exercised, saying merely, “He does not speak for me.”
His advisers then urged him to react more firmly. He did the next day, calling Wright’s performance “divisive and destructive.”
But Wright’s anti-US slanders at the Press Club were only a repetition of his sermons that hadn’t aroused such a disavowal. The difference was that, with every word Monday heard on national cable TV, Obama no longer could slough off what the preacher said as out of context.
Over the last two years, Obama on occasion has appeared with Wright and praised him as a valued counselor and dear family friend. But Obama on Tuesday summarily dismissed the man who used to be his spiritual mentor as a “pastor,” just as Wright had dismissed him as a “politician.”
Obama’s supporters hope the issue is out of the news. But Jeremiah Wright, thrown under the bus by his former parishioner, can re-emerge at any time he wishes and renew discussion of the Democratic front-runner’s real identity.