The Wright Stuff?

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 18, 2008 12:54 PM

Barack Obama gives a major speech on race today, and it has the feel of a turning point.

Despite some major media outlets playing down or ignoring the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy, it's all over cable and the blogs and gaining significant traction, particularly at the water-cooler level.

It's not that I think the Illinois senator should be tarred with every eccentric or anti-American ranting by the reverend (the United States of KKK, the government invented AIDS and so on). But if Wright has been Obama's friend for two decades, presided at his wedding and baptized his daughters, it's hard to swallow the idea that the candidate wasn't in any way familiar with some of the man's more extreme rhetoric.

Obama's problem is that he's still in the process of introducing himself to the country. The Wright albatross could weigh him down among those who don't know much about him or weren't quite comfortable with him.

It would be bad enough if we just had transcripts of Wright's uglier broadsides. But the fact that there's video means it can replay as an endless loop on television, especially on Fox. And that comes at a time when Hillary Clinton is doing better among white voters.

Obama has run a remarkable campaign in getting to the point where he's the Democratic front-runner. He will need all of his considerable skill to deal with this mess.

"Faced with what his advisers acknowledged was a major test to his candidacy," says the New York Times, "Senator Barack Obama sought on Monday to contain the damage from incendiary comments made by his pastor and prepared to address the issue of race more directly than at any other moment of his presidential campaign."

Too bad the Times thought this was worth only an item last Friday. Of course, that's more than The Washington Post ran, but at least my paper gave the story front-page play Saturday, while the Times stuck it inside.

"With his address in Philadelphia today," says the Chicago Tribune, "the senator from Illinois faces a moment in his campaign as pivotal as the one that John F. Kennedy, the party's nominee for president in 1960, confronted in explaining his Catholicism to a Baptist audience in Houston. Republican Mitt Romney's attempt at explaining his independence from the Mormon church last year sounded only a pale echo of that challenge."

Marc Ambinder fact-checks Bill Kristol and prompts a correction. Kristol, citing the conservative site Newsmax, wrote in the NYT that Obama was at the Trinity church July 22 when Wright railed about the "arrogance" of "the United States of White America." Turns out he wasn't.

"The error is in trusting the source without checking," Ambinder writes. "The truth is that Obama did not attend church on July 22. He was on his way to campaign in Miami."

Kristol's column, and the correction:

"In this column, I cite a report that Sen. Obama had attended services at Trinity Church on July 22, 2007. The Obama campaign has provided information showing that Senator Obama did not attend Trinity that day. I regret the error."

Paul Burka, senior executive editor of Texas Monthly, argues that the damage to Obama from Wright's words is irreparable:

"A candidate for president of the United States cannot cozy up to someone with this kind of anti-American rhetoric. He has lost Main Street white America. Is anyone going to believe that he didn't know about Wright's views? Is anyone going to accept as an explanation that he wasn't in attendance when these things were said? He'll get clobbered in Pennsylvania, clobbered in Indiana, clobbered in Kentucky.

"This isn't about white racism. It's about Wright racism.

"I thought that Obama was exempt from racial reactions because he was the Tiger Woods of politics. People looked at him and saw him not as someone who is black, but as someone who transcended race because of his unique skills and accomplishments. Not any more. He just triple bogeyed the presidency. He's done."

Andrew Sullivan challenges Burka's argument:

"I think that the kind of politics that ensures that someone's pastor's rhetoric trumps every other issue in a campaign is waning. Because many Americans understand that the country's problems are really too deep for this kind of thing to be dispositive. Because Obama's long record is transparently not in any way equatable with Jeremiah Wright's worst moments on YouTube."

At the New Republic, Michael Crowley finds a broader reason to be depressed:

"I do worry that this lays bare a very grim truth: That even middle-class black American culture is more angry and alienated than most whites understand, and that our country is simply not yet at the point where even an ostensibly post-racial black candidate can escape that dynamic entirely. (Indeed not only was Wright perfectly acceptable to Obama and his Chicago circle, but it seems likely that it would have been difficult for Obama to separate himself from the preacher had he wanted to, lest he be accused of not being an 'authentic' member of the south side black community.)

"In other words, what's happening here is far bigger than the particulars of Obama and Wright, it's about cultural dissonance that was going to bubble up one way or another. And as a colleague put it to me, in terms I hope are too pessimistic: 'It makes me think it's going to be at least another generation before we see a black man elected president.' If Obama can prove him wrong then he really may be a world-historical figure."

How's this for a twist?

"Leading opponents of affirmative action are increasingly seizing on Illinois Senator Barack Obama's historic run for the presidency as proof that race-based remedies for past discrimination are no longer necessary," says the Boston Globe.

Hillary has never been terribly popular at Daily Kos, but now Markos is really unloading on her:

"Clinton isn't the most horrible person in the world. She's actually quite nice, despite all her flaws, and would make a fine enough president.

"If she was winning. But she's not, and that's the rub.

"First of all, the only path to victory for Clinton is via coup by super delegate. She knows this. That's why there's all the talk about poaching pledged delegates and spinning uncertainty around Michigan and Florida, and laying the case for super delegates to discard the popular will and stage a coup.

"Yet a coup by super delegate would sunder the party in civil war. Clinton knows this, it's her only path to victory, and she doesn't care. She is willing -- nay, eager to split the party apart in her mad pursuit of power.

"If the situations were reversed, and Obama was lagging in the delegates, popular vote, states won, money raised, and every other reasonable measure, then I'd feel the same way about Obama. (I pulled the plug early on Dean in 2004.) But that's not the case.

"It is Clinton, with no reasonable chance of victory, who is fomenting civil war in order to overturn the will of the Democratic electorate. As such, as far as I'm concerned, she doesn't deserve 'fairness' on this site. All sexist attacks will be dealt with -- those will never be acceptable. But otherwise, Clinton has set an inevitably divisive course and must be dealt with appropriately.

"To reiterate, she cannot win without overturning the will of the national Democratic electorate and fomenting civil war, and she doesn't care. That's why she has earned my enmity and that of so many others."

Meanwhile, a Kos contributor, Alegre, doesn't want to file any more:

"I've been posting at DailyKos for nearly 4 years now and started writing diaries in support of Hillary Clinton back in June of last year. Over the past few months I've noticed that things have become progressively more abusive toward my candidate and her supporters.

"I've put up with the abuse and anger because I've always believed in what our on-line community has tried to accomplish in this world. No more. DailyKos is not the site it once was thanks to the abusive nature of certain members of our community.

"I've decided to go on 'strike' and will refrain from posting here as long as the administrators allow the more disruptive members of our community to trash Hillary Clinton and distort her record without any fear of consequence or retribution."

Kos dismisses the complaint, saying lots of people get roughed up on his site.

Here's an interesting poll finding from USA Today:

"By 55%-37%, Democrats and independents who 'lean' Democratic say an outcome in which Clinton lost among pledged delegates but prevailed with the help of super delegates would be 'flawed' and 'unfair' -- including 77% of Obama supporters and 28% of Clinton supporters."

Tom Marquardt, the editor of the Annapolis Capital, admits he's selling access to his news pages. The Anne Arundel Medical Center will provide content for his monthly health section. "I'm not entirely comfortable with the arrangement, purely for journalistic reasons. But in the end I think the reader benefits."

I suspect lots of readers won't be comfortable either.

You know, I was just thinking about what a lovely moment it was for the nation's first blind governor to take the oath of office in Albany, after the seaminess of Spitzer Week. But now I think it would be more efficient to form a club of elected officials who haven't fooled around. The Daily News breaks the story:

"The thunderous applause was still ringing in his ears when the state's new governor, David Paterson, told the Daily News that he and his wife had extramarital affairs.

"In a stunning revelation, both Paterson, 53, and his wife, Michelle, 46, acknowledged in a joint interview they each had intimate relationships with others during a rocky period in their marriage several years ago.

"In the course of several interviews in the past few days, Paterson said he maintained a relationship for two or three years with 'a woman other than my wife,' beginning in 1999. As part of that relationship, Paterson said, he and the other woman sometimes stayed at an upper West Side hotel -- the Days Inn at Broadway and W. 94th St."

Well, it's no Mayflower, but I guess it was sufficient.

" 'This was a marriage that appeared to be going sour at one point,' Paterson conceded in his first interview Saturday. 'But I went to counseling and we decided we wanted to make it work. Michelle is well aware of what went on.' "

Obviously, this is different than hiring hookers, and Paterson and his wife have made their peace with it. I predict the media will give him a pass and this will be a one-day story. Okay, two days.

And if that isn't enough sex in politics, the Newark Star Ledger drops this bomb about the ex-governor across the river:

"A former aide to James E. McGreevey said yesterday that he had three-way sexual trysts with McGreevey and his wife before they occupied the governor's mansion, challenging Dina Matos McGreevey's assertion that she was naive about her husband's sexual exploits."

And: "In an e-mail to The Associated Press, the nation's first openly gay governor said published reports by former campaign aide Teddy Pedersen were true . . .

"His e-mail to The Associated Press came shortly after one from Matos McGreevey. She said Pedersen's claims of consensual three-way sex 'are completely false and were prompted by Jim McGreevey.' "

Well, two out of three people say it happened.