Obama, Wright and Building a Progressive Majority

Even though I am a stalwart Obama supporter, I believe that the Reverend Wright issue does in fact represent a fundamental threat to his campaign. Yes, it's a "distraction" from the "issues," but let's be real here folks; the American people do not elect Presidents based on issues. If that were the case we would have had nothing but Democratic Presidents from FDR until the present. They vote based on personality, or to put it in a better light -- leadership, character and integrity.

If we remind ourselves of the Rovian school of politics, you take your opponents greatest strengths, and by hook or by crook, you turn them into weaknesses. Thus, the textbook example would be the "Swift-boating" of John Kerry, who I think we can all agree won the Democratic nomination because of his record of military service and was then turned into a traitor.

If we can summarize Obama's greatest strengths, it has to be his unique ability to bring people together across racial, political and other divides, his "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" sort of image as a non-politician politician who has not yet sold his soul to the ways of politics, and his judgment. Reverend Wright is a living, breathing fundamental threat to all of those claims . . .

We are, of course, well acquainted with the first aspect of Reverend Wright's challenge to Obama's candidacy -- his status as a racial conciliator. Obama responded with his "race" speech, which seemed to quell things. For myself, I must admit that I thought that speech was his first major mistake of the campaign in that he racialized the issue with Wright, i.e. made it into an issue between white America and black America, whereas it should've just been an issue with a cranky old preacher who sometimes says things that make no sense and our way outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse, something that many religious leaders, white and black, tend to do. Here the things that Obama said instead that I find problemmatic:

Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

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 - 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.

. . .

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

. . .

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted.

. . .

For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

Not to overly simplify matters, but Barack essentially said that we should give Reverend Wright a pass on the statements in question because of his race. For a minute it seemed to work, and everyone congratulated Obama on having made an amazingly adult and poignant speech about our nation's "original sin" -- the problem of race that has never been adequately addressed, and it was true. It was an amazing speech on race, probably the best given by a major public figure since the 1960's. The only problem was that it did not address the issue at hand: Jeremiah Wright's statements were outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse in America, no matter the race of who said them.

I don't know the inside story of course, but based on the succeeding events, I gather that Reverend Wright did not take kindly to Obama's characterization of him as some old, out of touch black man still caught up in the resentments of the past, while at the same time white working class voters in Pennsylvania didn't buy that Reverend Wright's comments were nothing more than a good starting point for a long-neglected national conversation about race.

Now, believe me, I do not blame Barack for his approach. The truth of the matter is that there is a lot of truth in Reverend Wright's words, both as a matter of factual history, and in so far as he is expressing the frustration and bitterness that is part of the black experience in America. But unfortunately, that has nothing to do with politics, particularly politics of the variety in which Barack is currently engaged. Barack is looking to build a new progressive majority of Americans of all kinds that can bring about fundamental changes in our government. Reverend Wright's rhetoric does not help in that cause, because that is not the cause to which Reverend Wright owes his allegiance.

Which brings us to the second and potentially even more damaging aspect of Reverend Wright's threat when he told the National Press Club that Barack's disassociation with him was just based on politics:

Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls, Huffington, whoever's doing the polls. Preachers say what they say because they're pastors. They have a different person to whom they're accountable.

Not only was Reverend Wright casting doubt on Obama's identity as a racial conciliator, but he was now basically calling him a typical lying politician to boot. The mythic quality of this situation is almost too much to believe. It's a very old story, the mentor father figure who becomes jealous as his mentee far exceeds him in fame and power and undercuts him at his most vulnerable moment. It finally became clear to Barack that Jeremiah Wright may be a part of this country, but his rhetoric and his views were plainly antithetical to everything that Obama was seeking to accomplish:

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.

Now, I’ve already denounced the comments that had appeared in these previous sermons. As I said, I had not heard them before. And I gave him the benefit of the doubt in my speech in Philadelphia, explaining that he has done enormous good in the church. He has built a wonderful congregation. The people of Trinity are wonderful people, and what attracted me has always been their ministries reach beyond the church walls.

But when he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the U.S. government somehow being involved in AIDS, when he suggests that Minister Farrakhan somehow represents one of the greatest voices of the 20th and 21st centuries, when he equates the United States wartime efforts with terrorism, then there are no excuses.

They offend me. The rightly offend all Americans. And they should be denounced. And that’s what I’m doing very clearly and unequivocally here today.

I consider this a potentially seminal moment in the history of the progressive movement in America. The trap that Barack fell into with Reverend Wright is a trap that has ensnared many of us. Where do we draw the line between speaking out about the injustices and wrongs of our nation and our government and engaging in divisive, unproductive and unnecessarily inflammatory rhetoric that gets us no closer to our goals? Even more complex is how do we draw those lines in a way that works for people on all sides of our racial divides?

The fundamental lesson that I think Barack and the rest of us should take from this episode is that the answer to the question of whether Jeremiah Wright gets a pass on his rhetoric of anger and frustration because he's black is a resounding, "No!" If we are going to build a true progressive majority for social change in America, there has to be established boundaries of discourse, and those boundaries have to apply to everyone, regardless of race, religion, class, etc. Now reasonable minds can of course disagree about what those boundaries are, and that's completely fine. But the larger point is that the transgressions of those boundaries cannot be excused by reference to the racial background of the speaker in question.

Of course there's always free speech and freedom of religion, etc. People are free to say whatever they want, but not if they want to be a part of the movement to build a progressive majority for change. And if you don't want to be a part of that, then please don't pretend to be. You are marginal (by your own choice) to this political cause. If you can gather enough people behind your version of the world, more power to you.

What does this mean for Barack going forward? In the end, this will come down to the third aspect of Jeremiah Wright's threat to Obama's candidacy: the question of judgment, i.e. why did he join this church and stay there for twenty years? Personally, I don't blame Barack for falling into this trap, which was set long before he came upon the scene. He met Jeremiah Wright when he was 27 years old, and living for the first time in his life in a black community. For a young politically-motivated, religious skeptic like Barack, Jeremiah Wright's brand of socially and politically conscious faith understandably must've have been a powerful attraction. As the years went by after that, I'm sure Barack may have had increasing second thoughts about his choice of religious institution, but how do you just leave the church where you were baptised, married, and where your kids were baptised because of something your pastor said?

Hopefully, however, Barack's final rejection of and disassociation from Jeremiah Wright will prove to be his "Sista Souljah" moment, the point in time when he conclusively demonstrated to America that he will be a President for all of Americans, not just black people. I think many Americans are well aware that we have far more to gain by helping Barack build a progressive majority for change than by reverting to the kind of unproductive rhetoric that Reverend Wright seems intent on bringing us back to. Barack has only to lead the way and we will follow. Barack has been making lemonade out of lemons throughout this whole campaign, and this is certainly the ultimate lemon. I, for one, am very thirsty.