Monday, April 28, 2008 - Posts
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After his speech today at the National Press Club, Jeremiah Wright was asked by the moderator whether he honestly believes, as he said in one of his sermons, that “the government lied about inventing the AIDS virus as a means of genocide against people of color.” That claim (which Bill Moyers inexplicably failed to ask Wright about in his April 25 interview) has been the weirdest of his various inflammatory claims.
Rather than address the substance of the question, Wright said, “Have you read [Leonard G.] Horowitz's book Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola”?
The Horowitz book, published in 1996, argues that the U.S. government created the AIDS and Ebola viruses in the course of performing cancer research on monkeys. Its author also wrote Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse, a book that purports to reveal “Bible codes hidden for 3,000 years that have major implications for personal and world healing,” according to his Web site. Horowitz doesn’t believe in Darwinian evolution, either, and he claims to be descended from Moses and King David.
Wright’s allegation about AIDS has no factual basis, of course, but medical experimentation on black Americans is well-documented. Wright today cited the Tuskegee experiment—a syphilis study in which the U.S. Public Health Service failed to treat 400 syphilitic black men in Alabama for 40 years—as an example. From there, he leapt to the conclusion that “our government is capable of doing anything.” Juliet Lapidos noted in a March 19 “Explainer” that nearly 27 percent of African-Americans believe that the AIDS virus was produced in a government lab, and 16 percent think it was created to control the black population.
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Last week we got all optimistic about John McCain’s decision to call off the cavalry in North Carolina, where the Republican Party was planning to run an ad attacking two Democratic gubernatorial candidates for their associations with Barack Obama using footage of the Rev. Wright’s sermons.
Alas, we spoke too soon.
Over the weekend, McCain walked back his suggestion that Wright was somehow off-limits. He gave two reasons: 1) He recently saw that Wright compared the Marines to, in McCain’s words, “Roman legionnaires who were responsible for the death of our Savior,” and 2) Obama said it was a “legitimate political issue.”
It doesn’t make much sense to assess McCain’s arguments using reason, since neither rationale is particularly rational. First off, Wright has said plenty of things equally or more offensive than the Marines line, never mind that Wright was himself a Marine. And secondly, what difference does it make that Obama called the issue “legitimate”? Was McCain just waiting for Obama’s say-so? If he was personally opposed before, it’s unclear why Obama’s words would suddenly change his mind.
From a political perspective, though, it makes perfect sense. Wright is political gold—the kind of ammunition that comes along rarely. So on the one hand, McCain wants people to know he’s upstanding and above the fray and all that. But on the other, he’d be a fool not to use Wright against Obama. This tension is likely to dog McCain through November. Then there’s always the possibility that harping on Wright could backfire. The moment it stops being about patriotism and starts being about race, McCain could get burned as badly if not worse than Obama.
Now there’s another GOP ad—this one in Mississippi—associating a local candidate with Obama while invoking Wright. What’s the word from McCain? So far, silence. McCain must realize he backed himself into a corner by asking the North Carolina GOP to retract the ad. When they refused, McCain looked silly, and Obama dinged him for it. He doesn’t want that story to replay itself, so better not to get involved. Hence the need to declare the issue “legitimate,” despite previous assertions.
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Barack Obama has been trying to keep the Rev. Jeremiah Wright out of the spotlight for a long time now. As far back as February 2007, he rescinded an invitation for Wright to deliver the invocation at his presidential announcement.
But now Wright is pushing back, closing his media tour today with a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Needless to say, this isn’t exactly the Obama campaign’s dream. From their perspective, any attention on Wright is bad. Obama has been struggling to win over working-class white voters—the last thing he needs is a media-driven refresher on his greatest liability. And indeed, Wright’s comeback may hurt Obama. But in the long run, it’s likely to help the candidate more than hurt him. Here’s how:
The YouTube ratio. Right now, Wright is defined as that guy you saw in that YouTube clip or looped on MSNBC. Naturally, it’s always his most heated remarks that get repeated. The more people see Wright in other contexts—on Bill Moyers, at the NAACP, at a conference of ministers—the less they’ll associate him with those initial images. It doesn’t hurt that when he tries, Wright can be charm itself.
Distance helps. In his interview with Moyers, Wright argued that Obama has to say certain things because he’s a politician. On the one hand, that argument makes the senator sound dishonest. But it also highlights that Obama and Wright are in different lines of work. As Wright said today, after Nov. 5, he’ll still be a pastor. He also challenged the idea that he’s Obama’s “spiritual mentor”—he uttered the phrase in a mockingly overdramatic voice. Rather, he said Obama is one of his members. That’s it. The more he distances himself from Obama, the more voters can see them as separate people with separate views.
The comeback kid. Wright may not be a politician, but he has a politician’s quickness—a quality that makes him remarkably entertaining to watch. When he was asked at today’s event how he feels about being an American, he diffused notions that he’s unpatriotic: “I served six years in the military,” he said. “How many years did Cheney serve?” When the moderator asked him to respond to Chris Rock’s joke that Wright is a “75-year-old black man who doesn't like white people—is there any other kind of 75-year-old black man?” Wright had the perfect retort: “That’s just like the media. I’m not 75.” (He’s 66.) It’s moments like these that could right Wright.
Changing the subject. Just as Obama turned the conversation away from Wright’s words with his race speech, Wright today tried to refocus the attacks on him as “attacks on the black church.” He discussed the evolution of black Christianity from the brush harbors where slaves convened to worship out of slaveholders’ sight through to the liberation theology of the 1960s. He reframed his own famous remarks as part of this tradition: “It is not bombastic, it is not controversial. It is just different.” This argument doesn’t excuse his most questionable comments—like, say, his claim that the AIDS virus was some government plot (which he utterly failed to address when asked about it at today's NPC event)—but it does explain the tradition from which he descends.
Better now than in October. The furor over Wright so far is nothing compared with what Republicans will drum up in the fall. John McCain announced yesterday that despite hinting that he’d leave the Wright issue alone—he asked the North Carolina GOP not to air an ad denouncing Obama and Wright—he now thinks Wright is fair game. So much for the civility race. Given that, it’s better for Wright to fight back and soften his image now than to allow his current image to calcify over the next six months. If he can go from Obama’s crazy minister to Obama’s controversial but thoughtful and witty minister, that will be a huge step in pre-empting the GOP onslaught.
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