I guess it went up in smoke when his bigoted pastor decided to play the race card.
Attacks on him are really attacks on the black church, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. said in a speech to the National Press Club in Washington on Monday, in which he mounted a spirited defense of views and sermons that have become an issue in the presidential campaign because Senator Barack Obama attended his church for many years...
Speaking Monday, Mr. Wright said that political opponents of Senator Obama were exploiting the fact that the style of prayer and preaching in black churches was different from European church traditions — “Different, but not deficient,” he said.
In questions and answers after his prepared remarks, Mr. Wright bristled when it was suggested that some of his past statements seemed unpatriotic. He served six years in the military, he declared, adding a gibe at the vice president, “How many years did Cheney serve?”
My father served more than three times the number of years Wright served. Does that mean he had a right to make stupid or racist remarks with impunity? I think not and he wouldn't have gotten a pass for making them.
Barack Obama thought he had put Jeremiah Wright behind him. But now, it looks like Wright is gonna stick to Obama like skunk stink.
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright said Monday that he will try to change national policy by “coming after” Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) if he is elected president.
The pastor also insisted Obama “didn’t denounce” him and “didn’t distance himself” from Wright’s controversial remarks, but “did what politicians do.”
Wright implied Obama still agrees with him by saying: “He had to distance himself, because he's a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was [portrayed as] anti-American.”
As I said in this post, Wright doesn't believe Obama doesn't agree with him on his various hair-brained positions regarding race. He essentially said that Obama was lying.
One has to wonder if Wright actually wants Obama to win. He's certainly doing all he can to prevent it. Maybe Wright truly believes all the bitter, nasty things he says about race in America. Perhaps he hasn't lived in the U.S. in the last 40-odd years and seen and appreciated the progress that's been made. That a black man is poised to win the nomination (however weakly) of a major political party is a stunning testament to how far as a nation we have come. But somehow, Wright is stuck back in the 1940s, in a Jim Crow South, at the Tuskeegee experiment.
And sadly for Barack Obama, his "spiritual mentor" (Wright says he's his pastor) is effectively blowing any possibility of Obama winning the presidency. Why? Because even if there is lingering racism in America--and there is--you don't win the presidency by bludgeoning white Americans with past racism or present day perceived racism. We don't want the guilt and we won't accept it.
Don't take my word for it. Others are saying it, too.
Should it become necessary in the months from now to identify the moment that doomed Obama's presidential aspirations, attention is likely to focus on the hour between nine and ten this morning at the National Press Club. It was then that Wright, Obama's longtime pastor, reignited a controversy about race from which Obama had only recently recovered - and added lighter fuel.
Speaking before an audience that included Marion Barry, Cornel West, Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party and Nation of Islam official Jamil Muhammad, Wright praised Louis Farrakhan, defended the view that Zionism is racism, accused the United States of terrorism, repeated his view that the government created the AIDS virus to cause the genocide of racial minorities, stood by other past remarks ("God damn America") and held himself out as a spokesman for the black church in America.
In front of 30 television cameras, Wright's audience cheered him on as the minister mocked the media and, at one point, did a little victory dance on the podium. It seemed as if Wright, jokingly offering himself as Obama's vice president, was actually trying to doom Obama; a member of the head table, American Urban Radio's April Ryan, confirmed that Wright's security was provided by bodyguards from Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.
I'm not sure how Barack Obama distances himself from this freak show enough to persuade voters he is a (rational) "agent of change." But even Joel Klein isn't buying Wright's "all black churches are like this" line.
I've been to dozens and dozens of African-American church services over the years, including the investiture of one of my friends as an AME minister two years ago, and I have very rarely, if ever, heard the kind of rants that are part of Reverend Wright's canon. Yes, as many have pointed out, Martin Luther King Jr. gave some angry, angry sermons--especially about the obscenity of the war in Vietnam--but for Wright to say the attacks on him are an attack on the black church is to offer a straitened and solipsistic view of that grand institution. Black liberation theology is not the black church.
And worse, Wright's purpose now seems quite clear: to aggrandize himself--the guy is going to be a go-to mainstream media source for racial extremist spew, the next iteration of Al Sharpton--and destroy Barack Obama.
I almost feel sorry for Barack Obama.
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