Tonight proved to be riveting political theater. I watched Barack Obama interviewed on three straight cable networks. While the talking heads on each channel were predictably different, the interviews took on very similar tacks. How long have you been going to TUCC? Why didn’t you distance yourself from Wright before? What do you denounce? Etc. And out of it all I finally grasped the real issue at heart here: judgment.
For the right wing, this is about patriotism. Does Barack Obama actually share Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s radical and often anti-American political views? Since Republicans tar every Democrat with the crime of insufficient patriotism, it’s been striking to me up to now just how spurious this claim has been. Focus on flag pins, hands on heart and a comment from Michelle Obama taken out of context have only convinced me that the patriotism charge is bogus. So they’ve turned to the even more comical Muslim smear. The Wright comments don’t really add to this except for people who already believe that Democrats detest their country.
But there is a deeper and more serious issue at the heart of this controversy that has little to do with Obama’s political views and a lot more to do with his character: judgment. In fact, he’s made his judgment a key part of his campaign. He doesn’t claim to have perfect judgment but he does insist that he gets the big things right. For many Americans his Iraq stance in 2002 is an example of this.
But the Wright controversy – and especially the responses Obama offered in all three interviews – raised a different kind of judgment question. Why did he stick around the Trinity United Church of Christ even if he vehemently disagreed with Reverend Wright’s political views? There are two theoretical and plausible ways to answer this. The first is that Obama – like many church and synagogue goers – simply compartmentalizes his relationship to his place of worship. That is, he loves the Jesus, faith and community but tunes out or occasionally cringes at sermon time. We’ve all been in religious situations like this, where we cherish the minister or rabbi for their personal pastoral care but we find their comments on this or that issue objectionable. We recognize that the politics of religious officiants do not comprise the totality of the overall ministry.
But Obama has only partly gone down this route. He’s praised Wright’s personal ministry to the Obama family for years and he still holds that relationship in high esteem. But in the interviews tonight Obama made a second claim that is a bit surprising. He says he simply never heard these incendiary sermons while in the pew, and that the first he heard of the controversial nature of some of Wright’s sermons was in early 2007. It was alarming enough at the time to keep Wright off the announcement program. He also insisted that if he did hear these sermons he would have told Wright to knock it off because they’re inappropriate. And then, if Wright persisted in these paranoid rants, Obama would quit the church.
So this raises a question about judgment and even honesty here. Did Obama really not know about these sermons? I think it’s very plausible that he did not sit in the pews for them. TUCC runs several services each Sunday and it’s likely that Obama did not attend the big league “Hour of Power” service from which the DVDs are taken. Like most megachurches (TUCC has 6,000 members), Obama’s church has more family-oriented services as well as the theatrical Hour of Power. My guess is that Obama brought his children in to the family services and so never heard the incendiary remarks there. That much is highly believable. But did Obama really not know that Wright even said these things? Did not news of, say, the 9/11 sermon not percolate throughout the TUCC community such that Obama would have heard about it – even if he didn’t hear the sermon itself? And if he did hear of it, why did he not say anything of concern to Jeremiah Wright?
I trust Barack Obama. I’ve trusted him from the beginning and I trust him now. If this were a different political candidate I’d be certain that there was some sort of obfuscation going on. But I just don’t see that from Obama. Nevertheless, that means I have to believe in his judgment as well as his honesty. If it turns out that he either did attend some of these incendiary speeches, or that they were so commonplace that Obama would have found them unremarkable, then I would have to question his judgment. Why would he continue to attend a church so contrary to his own views? If he compartmentalized, did he not bother to ask what was going on at the Hour of Power?
This is a tough issue for me. I’m as big an Obama supporter as you can get. A big draw for me is his ability to turn the generational page. In fact, one very appealing comment he made tonight was that Wright is stuck in the 1960s era of radicalism and anger and Obama wants to turn to a new and more hopeful age. Wright serves to highlight that transformation in a way. But I want to make sure that Obama was honest tonight that he never heard these kinds of speeches. If it checks out, I think the whole story blows over. The timing is perfect for Obama as no election comes until late April. By then we’ll have forgotten about all this. And the public will have heard Obama’s condemnation of Wright such that when the inevitable GOP 527 group offers the attack ad, people will say, “Yeah, we’ve already heard about that. Whatever.”
I think Barack Obama handled this masterfully by taking it head on. Video is too powerful to ignore. But he made some statements that went beyond what I expected. He claimed that this stuff was news to him too. That’s possible. I certainly hope it’s true.