Why McCain Won’t Play the Wright Card

One of the more disturbing trends at recent McCain/Palin rallies is the tendency of audience members to shout dangerous things, including “terrorist,” “kill him,” and “off with his head.” The Ayers issue – played mostly by Palin – has deliberately stoked this sort of rage at Obama. And more and more those asked to introduce Palin have invoked Barack “Hussein” Obama, clearly with the intention of making Obama look dangerous.

But they have not played the Wright card yet. Bill Kristol asked Sarah Palin why Wright has not come up and, while she wished the campaign went there, she acknowledged McCain’s refusal to bring it up.

But why?

McCain has suggested in the past that it would be “dishonorable” to bring the Wright issue up. But I don’t buy that at all; the whole campaign has been run in the gutter.

No, there is another reason why McCain won’t go the Wright route: he’s worried that he would lose control of it.

By invoking Reverend Wright, McCain would be explicitly injecting racial anxiety into the campaign. Wright, more than a radical preacher in most people’s eyes is a BLACK militant – a quasi-Farrakhan type. He symbolizes all that terrifies vaguely racist whites about African Americans in this country.

And the invocation of him would invite reaction from the crowd that would make “terrorist” seem like small potatoes. Yes, openly racist people would feel emboldened to attend a McCain/Palin rally and yell bigoted comments that would, undoubtedly, be picked up by the media. The rallies would be easily mocked as veritable Klan rallies as angry white mobs shout racial epithets at the very name of Jeremiah Wright. McCain would lose control of the issue and it would backfire.

That is why we will never hear about Jeremiah Wright from the McCain campaign. Much as some on the right would love to use it as a trump card against Obama, McCain’s top staff know that Wright would be like a live grenade that could blow up in their face. And they don’t want to go there.