Rove's Second Act

"The Democrats are famous for forming circular firing squads. But apparently the real gunplay doesn't begin until every member of the firing squad thinks he or she has been the victim of racism or sexism. Then, the smell of gun smoke is mingled with self-pitying and overwrought accusations of race or gender bias . . .

"That the race card outranks the gender card has to be galling to Hillary's feminist supporters, giving some of Ferraro's comments their splenetic edge. The Left has long had a holy trinity of class, gender, and race. As a woman candidate who appeals to lower-income voters, Hillary is two-for-three in the sacrosanct categories of grievance, but race is the holy of holies."

Now that the MSM have finally woken up to the inflammatory rhetoric of Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Andrew Sullivan, usually a big booster, sounds disappointed:

"Obama needs to be much more forceful and candid in explaining his relationship with Wright. I'm a little leery of getting in between a man and his minister - it's not unlike the lawyer-client relationship in some ways. And, goodness knows, I have had many a priest with whom I have disagreed or even found offensive. But like many people, I wouldn't sit through one of these sermons, let alone come back for more. And it would be helpful, to say the very least, if Obama told us more candidly why he did and does."

Sullivan seemed satisfied, though, with Obama's cable interviews on the subject Friday night and his Huffington Post piece on his relationship with Wright.

Dick Polman also gives the senator something of a pass:

"Most voters won't hold Obama responsible for the Rev. Jerimiah Wright's most provocative pulpit pronunciamentos. Most voters won't automatically assume that Obama shares the views expressed at the Trinity United Church of Christ. But for those voters who are prone to believe that Obama is insufficiently American, or a Muslim foreign agent who is bent of destroying America from within, certain Wright rhetorical tidbits will fit the profile just fine."

I don't get this line of reasoning. I think Obama is quintessentially American, but he's also had a longtime friendship with a guy who talks about the United States of KKK and seems to view 9/11 as a payback for American foreign policy. Doesn't that raise legitimate questions?

Atlantic's Matthew Yglesias sees the controversy as not very important, and yet potentially damaging:

"I see this as a basically trumped-up issue. Obama's enemies have put this Wright stuff out there in bad faith, not because they're genuinely uncertain as to what Obama thinks, but merely because they think it can hurt him electorally.

"But of course they're right that it'll hurt him electorally because Obama's going to have a hard time explaining [what] I take to be the truth, namely that his relationship with Trinity has been a bit cynical from the beginning. After all, before Obama was a half-black guy running in a mostly white country he was a half-white guy running in a mostly black neighborhood. At that time, associating with a very large, influential, local church with black nationalist overtones was a clear political asset (it's also clear in his book that it made him, personally, feel 'blacker' to belong to a slightly kitschy black church)."

Ari Berman weighs in for the Nation: