Why did Wright do it?

By now everybody is familiar with Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s National Press Club appearance and Senator Barack Obama’s response to it.

Obama has had a long and close personal relationship with Wright and when shown the offensive video snippets last month he believed they had to have been taken out of context. Subsequent release of the extended versions of those sermons showed that the media had, in fact, taken much of what Wright said out of context. It relieved Obama – and supporters like me – that Rev. Wright was not a certifiable lunatic and bigot as portrayed by Fox News. And while Obama knew of Wright’s reputation for fiery speeches and social controversy, it seemed wholly reasonable that Obama never heard Wright to be as controversial as was shown on the TV. The “he sat and listened to that for 20 years” argument always seemed weak because nobody was able to find any more offensive sermons of the same nature. The media snippets came from 3 or 4 sermons taken over several years, so it’s likely that Obama was not in attendance. Nobody has been able to show otherwise, and so Obama is being honest in his knowledge of Wright.

It seemed after the Philadelphia speech that Obama managed to thread an important needle – dissociating himself from the TV snippets while explaining his relationship to Wright in generational terms. It was a brilliant speech, actually, and it spurred the sort of national dialog that we needed. It stopped the bleeding and reinforced Obama as a unifier again. Except for a few nasty GOP TV ads, most people felt the Wright controversy had played out. Despite Obama’s difficulty with white working class voters in Pennsylvania, there is no evidence that the Wright issue actually swayed any voters.

But there was a problem. What did Wright think of all this? He seemed to be silent through this, giving a few speeches at select churches around the country. Never did Wright talk about his feelings. And then he appeared on Bill Moyers’ program. The interview actually went very well, showing Wright to be a reasonable man who understood how he was being caricatured in the press. The next day he gave a colorful speech at the NAACP meeting in Detroit that veered more into exhibitionism, but still was a positive – if somewhat zany – image. Even his speech at the National Press Club was measured. But then came the Q&A and it all went down hill.

What happened? Why did Reverend Wright transform from the reasonable guest on Bill Moyers and colorful if offbeat speaker in Detroit to the paranoid and defensive loon in the Q&A?

Lots of folks are offering their suggestions. They include:

1. Wright is jealous of his congregant and so wanted to embarrass him.
2. Wright worries that a black President will discredit his angry black nationalism; if a black man can be President then racism must not be as bad as he says…
3. Wright has never changed, was putting on a nice face for Moyers, but is a lunatic and bigot. And worse, Barack Obama knew this all along. Alas, Wright said Obama was just a lying “politician” in distancing himself from Wright’s remarks because, well, we know how it really is…
4. Wright has never changed but Obama was blinded to Wright’s radicalism and so was genuinely shocked to see Wright make the remarks out of any reasonable context.

I think #4 is partly right, but I think a 5th possibility explains it: Wright is an ego-centric man who felt challenged in the Q&A and took a strident tone because he loves that sort of limelight. In this reading, Wright is like any cable-TV shouter who thrives on confrontation and public animosity. Wright knew that he was taking his own remarks out of the context he described on Moyers’ show – but he didn’t care because he longed for the fight.

So what does this say about Wright’s views of Obama? Not much, actually. I don’t think Wright thought of what this meant for Obama at all, in fact. Judging by his own post-appearance reaction in the New York Times article today, Wright actually felt relieved after the appearance. As the article mentions, “Mr. Wright seemed to sense nothing wrong. A friend said he appeared buoyant and relieved afterward.”

If that sense is true then I think Wright was just craving press attention and a chance to fight back and shock the media folks who he thinks have been unfair to his church. Shock value was mere entertainment to him, as it is to Bill O’Reilly and the other cable TV hosts. The consequences for Obama be damned, this is just too much fun to give up the chance to say that the government created the AIDS virus or that Farrakhan was one of the greatest men in recent times. Watch them squirm as he riffs on Mohammad Ali’s “Vietcong never called me nigger” line with “Farrakhan never sold my people into slavery.” Wright was in his element, challenged by a hostile press. It was war and Wright was happy to oblige.

For Barack Obama, this was too much. No longer could Obama thread the needle and give Wright the benefit of the doubt. Not until Obama actually watched the video did Obama realize just what a buffoon Wright made of himself. It was, as Obama insisted, an act of disrespect – to Obama, to Obama’s campaign, and to the larger message of reconciliation that Obama has been advocating from the beginning.

I won’t pretend to know what the long-term consequences of this will be. Fallout so far is somewhat predictable, with those who already dislike Obama shouting “Too little too late!!!” and some of Obama’s staunchest supporters wondering why we can’t get back to real issues. So far the media has praised Obama for finally cutting the cord with Wright. And most recognize that Wright’s recent tirade made the break necessary; some have even speculated that Wright set up the public break on purpose, though I doubt that.

In one way Obama’s denunciation was a pure Sista Soldjah moment. But it carries greater risk because unlike Sista Soldjah, Jeremiah Wright is a man of great influence on Obama. On the other hand, there is something more powerful in watching a human being respond to betrayal. Obama’s evolved position on Wright appears to a neutral observer not the act of a dishonest politician looking for cover but a man discovering “that maybe Reverend Wright is not who I thought he was.”

Alas, the issue for Obama will not be honesty – did Obama really not know about Wright’s views? – but judgment. Nobody has produced any evidence in the last month showing Obama did know how incendiary Wright was before March – beyond one quoted line in a Rolling Stone article that convinced Obama to keep Wright off his kick-off staff in 2007. The problem is not how Obama could not have known about the lunacy of his pastor, but WHY he didn’t know of Wright’s lunacy.

There are only three answers to this question, one of which serves Obama well and the others do not. The good answer for Obama is that he didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to Wright’s sermons and Wright’s politics over the years, but he loved the congregation and the various outreach ministries. Considering that it was the outreach that brought Obama into TUCC in the first place, this is certainly plausible. And we all know that we don’t always accept the politics of our religious leaders.

But the second possibility is that Obama knew just how incendiary Wright was – even if he never heard the worst of the sermons – and yet continued to attend the church for fear of offending a large South Side constituency. This – more than the possibility that Wright’s radicalism seeped into Obama’s soul – is most troubling because it shows him to be just another politician going to church to be seen. In this reading, Wright was useful for Obama’s political career up through 2004 and the Senate race, but then served little use after that as Obama sought a wider constituency.

A third explanation goes to Obama’s ability to read Wright’s character. Did Obama build Wright up to be something he wasn’t? If so, what does that say about Obama’s judgment of character – something that would be critical in running the government. Does Obama blind himself to major character flaws in others? Is Obama oblivious?

I think the second explanation makes least sense because Obama would have left Trinity in 2005 instead of sticking it out if he only needed the church to serve his local ambitions. By 2005 TUCC would only become a liability if Obama truly knew how radical it was perceived. So was Obama just naive about Wright? Or did Obama just compartmentalize Wright and, like many church-goers, accepted the good of TUCC and discounted the bad?

My sense is that Obama simply ignored the controversial nature of Wright and embraced the congregation for all its good works. The question for voters is: is that acceptable? Does Wright’s willingness to embrace his idiotic statements force Obama to answer why he didn’t see the attention-grabbing of Wright before? Or was Wright’s NPC appearance really a shocking betrayal of Obama that genuinely caught him off guard? The voters will make up their minds.