Obama's Speech, Sliced and Diced

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 20, 2008 8:49 AM

It was a 37-minute speech that ranged widely across the jagged landscape of race relations, with Barack Obama challenging the media to lift their level of discourse above the inflammatory rhetoric of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

On the nightly newscasts and in the morning papers, many journalists did try to grapple with the complexity of Obama's Tuesday address about the roots of racial tension. But when the story hit the Cuisinart of talk-show debate, it got whipped into a single question: Did Obama adequately distance himself from the radioactive reverend?

Not surprisingly, most liberals loved the speech and many conservatives -- though not all -- lambasted it.

"Folks, don't fall for this," Sean Hannity said on his radio show. "Most of America is not going to buy this flimsy excuse . . . If you can't disown Reverend Wright, you're not qualified to be the president of the United States. I don't even think you're qualified to be senator."

"How do you possibly associate yourself in any way," Glenn Beck asked on his Headline News show, "with someone who believes the government invented the AIDS virus to kill African Americans?"

On the left side of the spectrum, radio commentator Ed Gordon called the speech "brilliant." CNN's Donna Brazile dubbed it "very courageous." Washington Post editorial writer Jonathan Capehart, on "NBC Nightly News," pronounced it "a very important gift" for the country.

"He did not oversimplify," said MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. "He actually brought down his rhetorical tone a notch so that this would be something that brought light and not heat to a subject on which there is so much heat. . . . I actually think that the speech did call out to Americans' better angels."

By inviting journalists to join a nuanced conversation about race, the Illinois senator was poking at a sore spot. News organizations are skittish about racial subjects, preferring to wrap them around the flap of the day rather than deal with underlying anger and grievances.

As Obama put it, the media often "tackle race only as spectacle -- as we did in the O.J. trial -- or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina." They can abandon that model, he said, or "we can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel every day" and make the presidential campaign about whether "I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words."

Many mainstream journalists cast the speech in a positive light. A Boston Globe news story called it "a frank reflection on the problems of race in America that rejected the minister's words but also drew a broader personal and historical context in which to read them."

NBC's David Gregory and Newsweek's Howard Fineman each called the speech "gutsy." ABC's George Stephanopoulos said it was "sophisticated" and "eloquent." CBS's Jeff Greenfield described the address as "exemplary," saying: "Only an African American can talk this bluntly about race." Time's Jay Carney said it was "exceptional" and "breathtakingly unconventional." "Nightline" co-anchor Terry Moran, who interviewed Obama afterward, said the senator was trying "to talk honestly about race."

Most voters didn't watch the morning speech, which was carried live on the three cable news channels, although a YouTube version was viewed 1.2 million times in the first 24 hours. Still, television excerpts have been critical in framing the narrative. The most frequently replayed lines were these, which followed Obama's criticism of Wright's harshest rhetoric: "I could no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I could no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother . . . who once confessed her fear of black men who pass her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

That proved a lightning rod for some conservative critics. "What he did," the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes said on Fox, "was throw his grandmother under the bus."

Others on the right offered mixed reviews. National Review called the speech "eloquently written, and at times moving. . . . But it should be noted that Obama deployed his formidable talents to try to minimize and excuse Rev. Wright's rants."

To their credit, the network newscasts ran four or five sound bites to evoke Obama's broader argument that while the anger of older blacks like Wright, 66, is understandable, the country needs to move beyond the racial wounds of the past. But Obama, 46, is trying to win the Democratic nomination, so the anchors kept returning to one core question.

"Is it enough to reassure white voters?" ABC's Charlie Gibson asked.

"Does it make too many white voters uncomfortable?" asked CBS's Katie Couric.

One lingering question for the news business is why, during 15 months of intense and largely positive coverage of Obama's candidacy, it took so long to focus on the pastor and family friend whose controversial views were no secret.

In March 2007, Fox News's Hannity conducted a contentious interview with Wright, saying that if a church made such comments about whites, "wouldn't we call that church racist?"

"No, we would call it Christianity," Wright responded.

Also that month, the New York Times quoted Wright as saying he had been disinvited from Obama's presidential announcement to avoid negative attention.

There were other hints. In a YouTube video posted a year ago, Wright rattled off a series of assertions about the country: "America is the number one killer in the world . . . We put [Nelson] Mandela in prison . . . We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."

In January, the Baltimore Sun reported on a sermon in which Wright repeatedly "singled out 'white reporters' for criticism," "talked of blacks being held down by attitudes of white supremacy," and charged that Bill Clinton "did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky." And that same weekend, Post columnist Richard Cohen criticized Wright for his support of Louis Farrakhan, an issue also raised by NBC's Tim Russert at a debate last month.

But it wasn't until last week, when Fox News and ABC News bought DVDs of Wright's sermons from the church, that the simmering controversy reached full boil. The recordings have long been sold by the church, but journalists did not seek them until now.

Fox Chicago correspondent Jeff Goldblatt says he was looking into whether Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ deserved its tax-exempt status. In his report on Wednesday, March 12, he played a clip of Wright saying that the country is "controlled by rich white people" and that Hillary Clinton "ain't never been called a [N-word]."

"When it became palpable to the public is when there was a videotape," Goldblatt says.

On "Good Morning America" the next day, Brian Ross played video of Wright saying "God damn America," asserting that the government gives African Americans drugs and that the 9/11 attacks showed "America's chickens are coming home to roost."

Ross says the tapes he ordered came in early this month and he soon "realized they went beyond what had earlier been reported . . . The 'God damn America' and 'US of KKK A' and 9/11 took it to a level that surprised me." Ross dispatched a crew to the church and the story was supposed to run early last week, but got bumped by the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal.

But even as CNN and MSNBC began airing the Wright videos, the New York Times and "NBC Nightly News" ran only brief items Friday, and The Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, USA Today and the "CBS Evening News" carried nothing. It wasn't until Saturday that the controversy hit The Post's front page.

As I suggest above, the reaction on the left and right sometimes made me wonder whether these pundits were watching the same speech. The only point of agreement I found is skepticism that it will help Obama with white, working-class voters, sometimes short-handed as Reagan Democrats.

The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn: "While I have no idea how it will play out politically, I thought it made an elegant and, at times, brilliant argument--not just for the Obama candidacy but also for the modern liberal agenda."

Michelle Malkin: "Barack Obama -- the self-anointed soul-fixing, nation-healing political Messiah -- has lost his glow. That is the takeaway from the beleaguered Democratic presidential candidate's 'major' speech in Philadelphia. For all of his supposedly unique and transcendent understanding of race in America, Obama's talk amounted to the same old, same old.

"The Glowbama mystique has gone the way of the Emperor's new clothes. Instead of accountability, we got excuses. Instead of disavowal of demagoguery, we got whacked with moral equivalence. Instead of rejecting the Blame America mantra of left-wing black nationalism, we got more Blame Whitey. Same old, same old."

Jonah Goldberg: "There was wonderful stuff to be found in Obama's address. You can be sure the mainstream press and the Democratic faithful will leap at the opportunity to coronate Obama for his statesmanship and brilliance the way a man dying of thirst plunges into the cool water of an oasis. The Wright story is over for everybody but the so-called forces of divisiveness. But oases can reveal themselves to be mirages . . .

"The old baggage has been replaced with shinier suitcases, but the contents are the same as ever. Black America's problems can be solved by spending more money on the same old Great Society programs. Any talk about black America's problems that takes the eyes off that prize is a 'distraction.' And, yet again, white Americans can prove their commitment to racial justice by going along with more big government. My hope for something better proved too audacious in the end."

The aforementioned Jay Carney, in Time:

"Obama put a new twist on his message of hope about a post-racial politics in America: he said America's not there yet, and that his candidacy, even if it succeeds, isn't enough to bring her there. Rather than try to counter the injection of race into the campaign, Obama administered an extra dose, hoping the live virus can also act as a vaccine."

Salon Editor Joan Walsh:

"Obama's stirring talk -- one of the most important addresses on race we've heard in recent memory -- was brave and poignant. But it was also disturbing in places, and may not put the Wright issue completely to rest.

"In his speech Obama tried to distance himself from Wright's more outrageous remarks, while honoring and preserving the personal -- and frankly political -- strength he's derived from his affiliation with the church and his spiritual mentor. It was a perilous move for Obama, and it's not clear he succeeded. . . .

"While I don't doubt his campaign's contention that he wasn't in the pews when Wright made some of his more outrageous charges, immortalized on tape and video, it's been hard to believe Obama was unfamiliar with Wright's overall harsh and sometimes paranoid political analysis."

Rick Moran of Right Wing Nuthouse likes the style but not the substance:

"Generally, I thought it was thoughtful, well delivered, and brutally honest in places.

"But I think Obama revealed more than he wanted to about exactly what kind of a candidate he truly is. Having eschewed labels like 'liberal' for the entire campaign, the speech left little doubt that Barack Obama is a dyed in the wool Democratic liberal who sees blacks and whites equally as victims of 'conservatives' and sees big government, statist solutions to our problems."

While Rick was composing these thoughts, his brother Terry was interviewing Obama for "Nightline." Last year, in fact, Terry Moran was asked about Rick's nuthouse:

"I love my brother something fierce. I am very proud of him. We do not agree on many, many things (as decades of uncomfortably loud dinner table disagreements have demonstrated). In no way do I endorse anything he writes; that's not for me to do here. But I will never disavow him. I will always defend him as an honorable man."

Interesting parallel, no?

You can almost sense the media's deflation over the release of Hillary Clinton's first lady schedule. "In some ways," says the NYT, "they provide support for Mrs. Clinton's assertion that she played a central public and private role in the policies of the Clinton administration."

"The documents include only Hillary Clinton's public schedules, not her private calendar," says Newsweek. "And even those appear to be heavily redacted to exclude almost anything that might be of interest to historians and the inevitable posse of 'oppo' researchers."

The AP reaches for this: "Hillary Rodham Clinton was home in the White House on a half dozen days when her husband had sexual encounters there with intern Monica Lewinsky, according to Sen. Clinton's schedule, released Wednesday among 11,000 pages of papers from her years as first lady."

Atlantic's Marc Ambinder says there's some nervousness out there:

"For the first time in two months, Democrats who had concluded that Barack Obama had sewn up the nomination, Democrats who support Barack Obama, Democrats who had concluded, as I had, that the mathematics work against Hillary Clinton, are filling my inbox and voice mail with versions of the same question: is his campaign in serious trouble?

"I dunno. I still think the math works against Clinton. More so, if no Florida and Michigan 2.0. But something is trembling beneath the surface.

"One neutral long-time Obama observer writes that Obama has been 'whipsawed' by [Wright] and Michigan/Florida, two external events over which he has no control.

"Note that the Clinton campaign has said word ZERO about the Wright story. I'm told that campaign manager Maggie Williams issued an edict to staff members and surrogates and top fundraisers, urging them to hold their tongues. That the Clinton campaign was able to keep to this discipline may turn out to be the most consequential [tactical] move they've made in months. If anyone associated with the campaign had waded into the Wright affair, it would have been politicized in a way that probably would have hurt Clinton and not Obama."

This nugget, from an LAT blog, jumped out at me too:

" 'You remember when, during the O.J. trial . . . black and white culture just had these completely opposite reactions and nobody understood it. I'm somebody who was pretty clear that O.J. was guilty,' Obama told 'Nightline's' Terry Moran."

I wonder if Jeremiah Wright thinks the Juice was railroaded.

A Public Policy Polling survey gives Hillary a 56-30 lead in Pennsylvania, and has her garnering 27 percent of the black vote. Meanwhile, a Reuters/Zogby poll has John McCain leading Hillary by 3 (a statistical tie) and Obama by 6.

Speaking of McCain, A.J. Rossmiller at Americablog jumps on his gaffe of saying Iran was training al-Qaeda operatives, which the senator corrected a moment later:

"McCain is at it again, this time telegraphing his profound lack of understanding of the regional dynamics. He recently claimed, multiple times, that Iran is training al Qaeda elements from Iraq. Iran, of course, is a Shia theocracy, and al Qaeda a Sunni terrorist group. This is like claiming that the RNC is training Democratic congressional candidates. Seriously -- this is a HUGE error. Not a single other government official or expert has claimed anything like this. It wasn't a momentary gaffe or slip; again, he said it multiple times. It's increasingly clear that he truly doesn't understand the situation . . . five years into the war."

A blunder, to be sure, but can the Democratic candidates really argue that they know more about foreign policy?

Chris Matthews seemed to enjoy dancing with Ellen DeGeneres yesterday. In fact, he was all over her. Click for the video.

And in today's installment of the David Paterson soap opera:

"Some advice to Gov. Paterson about the burly husband of your former lover: Stay away!

"That's what several sources who know Randy Loyd, the insurance executive married to former Paterson lover Lila Kirton, told the New York Post yesterday as they mulled over the new governor's stunning admission that he had a string of affairs with 'a number of' women . . .

"Loyd gave an alarming preview of that storied rage yesterday. Pulling up in his Mercedes at his White Plains home, photographers ran up to take his picture, touching off a screaming tantrum. 'Get out of here!' he yowled, chasing a pair of shutterbugs. 'Get off my property!' "

Hey, what did this guy do to deserve being harassed, other than pick up the paper and finding his wife had been fooling around?

Meanwhile, Paterson "defiantly challenged former Olympic gold medal winner Diane Dixon to make public the tape recordings she told [the New York] Post she possesses. She said the tapes demonstrate a close relationship with Paterson when he was lieutenant governor."