Here and elsewhere, much has been written about the latest chapter in the saga of the angry preacher from Chicago — perhaps too much. Regardless, I hope you’ll tolerate at least one more (seriously belated) take on this story.
First, it’s no surprise to regular readers that I’m an Obama fan. I’ve been especially passionate about defending him in the wake of the Wright debacle — so much so that I’ve grown terribly frustrated with those who suggest this debacle is relevant to the election. That frustration led me, earlier this week, to label the detractors “simple minded.” Many of them probably are. But two of my closest friends have recently voiced concerns about the Obama-Wright relationship, and while these friends are many things, they are not simple minded.
Accordingly, I’ve tried to better understand their concerns and have concluded that what may be bothering them most is not what we collectively know about Obama and Wright, but what we collectively don’t know — what we don’t (and can’t) know about the years between 1992 (when Obama joined Trinity United) and now.
Naturally, when people don’t or can’t know something, they fill in the blanks, drawing on their own experience, assumptions, and yes, biases. That’s not right or wrong. It’s biological. It’s human.
As a result, some of us fill in the blanks like I did, namely: We believe Obama was drawn to Wright and Trinity by their global consciousness and focus on social justice and good works. We further believe Wright was — initially, on balance — more uniting than divisive, slowly degenerating over time, culminating in a painful meltdown at the NPC earlier this week. During that trajectory, we can easily believe Obama was blinded by the good he saw in Wright, missing or refusing to believe the Reverend’s expanding paranoia and spite. Under this set of assumptions, it’s perfectly understandable why Obama stayed at the Church, why he hesitated to disown Wright — and why he finally, slowly, painfully did so.
In contrast, others (like my two friends) assume Wright was predominantly hateful all along. They thus find it inconceivable that Obama and his family could stay in that environment, that they wouldn’t file for divorce from Wright sooner.
OK. There we have it. We’ve each filled in the blanks. Now what? Where do we go from here?
Do we continue revisiting the same questions, the same scenarios, or do we move on, as the Senator and his spouse implored us to do in their recent Today Show appearance?
I, for one, think we move on. Regardless of which scenario our minds create and believe, none of it disqualifies Obama from being president. Even if we choose the “16-years-of-hateful-rants” scenario, we don’t have one shred of evidence that Obama agrees with those hateful rants. To the contrary: We have overwhelming evidence — from the way Obama has lived his life, from the way he has conducted himself in public and in private, from the disclosures and confessions in his books — that he took from Rev. Wright a social justice message and discarded the rest.
Those are facts. That is what we do know.
So here we are. At the crucial fork in the road. We can allow self-created scenarios, filled-in blanks, to outweigh reality. We can let assumptions trump facts. Or, instead, we can acknowledge the facts and move on to the more crucial questions of the here and now. Questions like: Who has the best plan to resolve the Iraq quagmire? Who is in the best position to begin healing our destroyed global credibility? Who has the most promising approach to universal healthcare? And so on.
Bottomline: I hope we can finally agree to accept or reject Obama (or Clinton or McCain) on their answers to those questions — not on the blanks we fill in with our self-induced fictions.