Ah Said, the Sheriff is a Ni-[DING!]
David Weigel | March 19, 2008, 8:43am
Guh. You don't need to be an Barack Obama partisan to find this
Jonathan Martin enterprise story in
The Politico sort of disturbing. The basics: Republican consultants are hopeful that the Jeremiah Wright episode will hammer home the meme that Obama is a black radical who hates his country.
If Michelle Obama’s gaffe caused some ripples in the right-wing pond, the Wright videos have detonated the equivalent of a daisy cutter on the conservative landscape, awakening an otherwise dispirited party base.
“I usually get three or four emails a week on Obama,” said Michigan Republican chairman Saul Anuzis Monday. “Today I received more than 10 – all of them on his minister.”
Among the e-mails Anuzis received was a link to a mash-up video splicing together Wright’s most extreme comments, Michelle Obama’s statement, footage of Obama not putting his hand over his heart during the anthem at a political event and images of Malcolm X and the two black Olympians in 1968 who raised their fists in the “black power” salute set to the iconic rap song by Public Enemy “Fight the Power.”
Very subtle. I've heard grumbling about Obama not saluting the flag for a while on the campaign trail. The day of the New Hampshire primary, some Republican activists (assuming Obama would win) said McCain would clobber him over that issue alone. The evolution of that meme into this one has been fascinating to watch.
“It’s harder for people to say it’s taken out of context because these are Wright’s own words,” noted Chris LaCivita, the Republican strategist who helped craft the Swift Boat commercials against Kerry that employed the use of their target’s own language when he returned from Vietnam and returned his medals. “You let people draw their own conclusions.”
“You don’t have to say that he’s unpatriotic, you don’t question his patriotism,” he added. “Because I guaran-damn-tee you that with that footage you don’t have to say it.”
I don't know. I'm uncomfortable with this. Obama's own "anti-America" moments in this chain have been limited to not wearing a flag pin and not putting his hand on his heart while singing the the national anthem. (The photos that circulate over e-mail claim this was actually during the Pledge, which isn't true.) The dynamite evidence in
United States v. Obama (2008) is the rhetoric of Obama's wife and his pastor. We've had presidential candidates' wives attacked before (1992 comes to mind), but his pastor? This is new territory for a presidential campaign, I think. Left playing Mr. Nice Guy on this Mike Huckabee, who said this on Joe Scarborough's morning show.
Obama made the point, and I think it's a valid one, that you can't hold the candidate responsible for everything that people around him may say or do. You just can't. Whether it's me, whether it's Obama...anybody else. But he did distance himself from the very vitriolic statements.
Now, the second story. It's interesting to me that there are some people on the left who are having to be very uncomfortable with what Wright said, when they all were all over a Jerry Falwell, or anyone on the right who said things that they found very awkward and uncomfortable years ago. Many times those were statements lifted out of the context of a larger sermon. Sermons, after all, are rarely written word for word by pastors like Reverend Wright, who are delivering them extemporaneously, and caught up in the emotion of the moment. There are things that sometimes get said, that if you put them on paper and looked at them in print, you'd say "Well, I didn't mean to say it quite like that."
And Huckabee has, you know, given some sermons. Has the left been playing dirty pool by pulling statements out of Jerry Falwell sermons, though? Sometimes, maybe, although the most controversial thing Falwell said in his final decade (blaming the ACLU and abortionists for 9/11) was actually during a CNN appearence. The implication of the Wright-Obama attack, though, is not that Wright is crazy, but that Obama is a secret racist and America-hater, and that the truth of this is only revealed by the statements of his wife and his pastor.
Headline explained
here.
Fluffy | March 19, 2008, 9:56am | #
Joe, I'd respect it more if they actually really wanted to fight old battles forever.
Anybody wants to fight about the Civil Rights Act of 1963, I'm there.
But they don't give a shit about the old battles and never did. They had the Presidency and both houses of Congress and didn't do dick about the old battles.
All they care about is avoiding crushing defeat in November and they're willing to make up lots of stupid shit to try to do that.
Obama is obviously a liberal. It should be possible to run against a liberal honestly and beat him. It would be possible, if it weren't for the fact that the Bush administration sucks as badly as it does, and if it weren't for the fact that George Bush is the biggest big government liberal since Johnson, and fellating Bush all this time has tied his supporters' hands this election cycle.
So they have to make up this nonsense and latch on to it in a campaign of faux outrage that makes the one maintained by liberal academia look sincere by comparison.
When Reagan ran against Carter in 80, he just said, "This guy is a liberal. [Insert examples.] Vote for me instead."
But this crew is too cowardly, too compromised, and too dishonest to do that. If they ran against Carter in 80, they probably would have had to make up a rumor that Jimmy was gay, or had a black love child, or that his cousin's friend's pastor had a pot leaf bumper sticker on his VW bus. This is what the GOP is reduced to in the 21st century.
Fluffy | March 19, 2008, 10:53am | #
Oh come on. Even Obama acknowledged that Wright's comments were wrong, divisive, and Anti-American.
Right, and yesterday my personal criticism of Obama was that by doing so he's pandering. And that he shouldn't have done that, however useful it may be electorally.
Personally, I never think of myself as "anti-American". But I despise just as many historical Americans as Wright does, and I have just as many - if not more - problems with our current system of governance and the existing code of laws. Anyone who makes any pretense about being a libertarian BY DEFINITION rejects about 90% of what the state currently does, and disdains the political history - and set of political actors - who brought it about.
But you know why I can oppose this much of the mainstream political narrative of America, but not consider myself anti-American? My automatic overriding sense of entitlement. I can always console myself with the thought that
I am America, and the rest of you assholes are interlopers who have fucked everything up.
But I honestly can concede that this sort of use of self-centredness as a psychological defense
probably isn't possible for a black American.
Black Americans were told they weren't really America for long enough that an outsider posture is still natural to them. Wright has obviously internalized it.
So where I see an unjust government and a political history of continual failure to live up to the promise of liberty, my White Guy Master of the Universe personality goes all
Atlas Shrugged and identifies itself as the true inheritor of "America", and wants the rest of you to get the hell out of the way.
But it seems perfectly natural to me that a black Christian preacher might see himself as an outsider, in opposition to America.
Our critiques of America share many of the same elements, but our personal identification with that critique changes.
But I think that Wright's own manner of personally identifying with his critique is incorrect, and concedes too much. If he could be made to realize that "America" is actually good and just in essence, and that the word "America" belongs to me and not to George Bush, maybe he would change his frame and damn
Bush, and not America, the way I do.
