Past political campaigns have had their share of people associated with candidates who are placed on the defensive — but seldom has one in any year had one as proactively insistent on keeping himself alive and injected into an excruciatingly close race as the political albatross now dangling around Democratic Senator Barack Obama named Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Aside from the eager nodding of heads and the unspoken “Keep it up!” you can almost feel coming from the campaign of rival Democratic Presidential wannabe Senator Hillary Clinton, conservative Republicans are ecstatic. Jonah Goldberg, writing in The Los Angeles Times:

God bless the Rev. Jeremiah Wright!

After Barack Obama gave his big race speech in mid-March, many critics noted that the Illinois senator had thrown his own grandmother under the bus to defend his controversial pastor. Well, Wright proved over the last few days that he would not be outdone. He not only threw Obama under the bus, he chucked much of the liberal and mainstream media under there with him. If this keeps up, to paraphrase Roy Scheider in “Jaws,” he’s gonna need a bigger bus.
For six weeks, Obama’s biggest supporters have diligently argued that to so much as mention Wright is in effect racist. When Hillary Rodham Clinton said that Wright wouldn’t have been her pastor, Andrew Sullivan gasped on his Atlantic blog that this was “a new low” in the election. When Lanny J. Davis, Clinton’s consummate spinner, defended her on CNN by describing what Wright actually said, CNN’s Anderson Cooper lambasted Davis for daring to even repeat Wright’s comments. Newsweek’s Joe Klein chimed in, “You’re spreading the poison right now.”

What Wright has done the past few days by (over)exposure is to leave himself in the eyes of many indefensible in terms of the center — and converted himself into an unrelenting albatross also chained to a 1,000 lb. anchor dangling around Obama’s neck:

Obama and his defenders have repeatedly insisted that the bits from Wright’s sermons that got wide circulation last month had been taken “out of context.” His infamous sound bites were grounded in concrete theological or factual foundations, they claim. He was quoting other people. He’s done good things. Nothing to see here, folks.

And so God bless Wright because he’s left all of these folks holding a giant, steaming bag of … well, let’s just call it a bag of “context.”

His positions and the context of his remarks, some could argue, are still explainable, but the problem is that those making that argument right now veer into a nuanced area of nuance — the kind of argument that usually does not work in elections where candidates oversimplify, generalize and try to link up their opponents with broad-brush imagery of stances, events or individuals that will be seen unfavorably by key chunks of an attention-span-challenged electorate.

All this comes at a time when Obama’s campaign is reportedly battening down the hatches for what is expected to be a brutal campaign lasting well into the summer, the New York Times reports:

Mr. Obama’s aides said that they remained confident he would win the nomination. “We feel very good about the position that we are in,” said David Axelrod, his chief strategist. “But we have gotten to the position we are in by taking every week and every contest seriously.”

Still, they said they were no longer as hopeful as they once were that the contest could be resolved before June 3, the day of the last primaries. As a result, they were girding for six weeks of attacks by Mrs. Clinton and potential election defeats that could raise further questions among superdelegates — the elected Democrats and party leaders who will ultimately determine the nominee — about Mr. Obama’s strength as a general election candidate.

And Wright’s double-whammy of appearances came at a time of introspection and private disappointment:

In discussions with donors and supporters last week, Mr. Obama’s advisers played down the loss in Pennsylvania, noting that both sides had expected Mrs. Clinton to win there.

Still, the message belied private frustration and disappointment that Mr. Obama shared with a few associates and advisers, particularly over the hardening narrative that he could not appeal to working-class voters, and a personal frustration for comments he made about some small-town voters being “bitter” at their economic conditions. (Mrs. Clinton seized on those remarks, which have shadowed his campaign.)

“Everyone’s got a real calmness about where we are,” said David Plouffe, who is Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, “but a real sense of urgency that we have eight contests coming up in pretty rapid succession.”

But now it’s clear from the amount of space Wright has gotten on blogs, on serious cable talk shows, on screaming head cable and radio talk shows and in the opinion columns:

Wright is proactively making it tough for Obama to right his campaign.

Will he have to make a statement to distance himself even more from him? And what if Wright’s love affair with national media coverage continues? In essence, Wright himself has been putting the muscle, meat and flesh on the skeletal stereotypical imagery critics have tried to sculpt about Obama. And he won’t stay out of the spotlight to let the issue defuse itself.

Candidates’ associates have seldom totally sank a national political campaign.

But perhaps we are about to see an example of what happens when an association does.

Cartoon by Eric Allie, Caglecartoons.com

UPDATE: Dick Polman has the same reaction:

While watching the Rev. Jeremiah Wright hold forth yesterday at the National Press Club, I began to entertain the notion that perhaps the guy was a Republican mole - trained in secret and dispatched by Karl Rove, or by one of his proteges, with instructions to inflict maximum damage on the Obama campaign.

But no. There is no need for GOP mischief-makers to lift a finger, not when Obama’s spiritual mentor seems capable of doing the work all by himself.

Here’s Obama, trying to get his sea legs again after suffering a third consecutive big-state defeat, trying to convince downscale, modestly-educated whites in Indiana and North Carolina that he’s not some scary apparition…and there’s Wright, crashing into the news cycle four days running, offering up new provocative soundbites to replace the old.

Twenty years ago, Michael Dukakis, the Massachusetts governor and Democratic presidential candidate, was dragged down in part because the GOP hung Willie Horton around his neck. (Horton was the black con who committed rape and murder while participating in a Massachusetts prison furlough program.) But as scary symbols go, at least Horton wasn’t out there on the stump, commanding a national audience, talking up the benefits of that Dukakis furlough program.

Read it in its entirety.