Exit Wright

By Joe Klein

In the hour before he divorced himself from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama held a town meeting in Winston-Salem, N.C., and used the occasion to announce several other divorces. He divorced himself from Hillary Clinton and John McCain on the issue of a summer gasoline-tax holiday, which he correctly described as "not an idea designed to get you through the summer. It's an idea designed to get them through the election." And then he divorced himself from some of the recent negative tactics of his campaign. "Over the past month or so, we've been getting whacked ... and sometimes we've been hitting back in ways that we're really not about." It was as if Obama were putting his personal gyroscope in order for the main act, the press conference in which he said he was "appalled" and "outraged" by his former pastor's views. He did this with typical restraint--his demeanor, as always, precisely presidential--but also with the sad and belated realization that the Wright controversy was not merely a "distraction." It was this year's edition of a problem that has hurt the Democratic Party since the Vietnam era, a fixation on the (often spectacular) deficiencies of superpower governance while slighting this nation's incredible strengths.

"I'm sick to death of [hearing] the sound bites of Rev. Jeremiah Wright," a woman said to Obama at the town meeting, adding that she wished everyone could watch Wright's public-television interview with Bill Moyers. It was a common sentiment on the left, especially in the blogosphere. And it was true that Moyers presented a fairer, more nuanced picture of Wright--especially the good works done by Wright's church, the hundreds of lives saved and enriched by the church's social ministry, which, if Saint Peter actually does sit on a cloud with an account book, will surely prove more important than Wright's self-absorbed lurches into hateful speech.

But the Reverend was outrageous, even on Moyers. He stood by what he had preached after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks: that this was a case of America's "chickens coming home to roost." He tried to say he was merely quoting U.S. Ambassador Edward Peck--but Wright chose to interpret those "chickens" not as the decision to place U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, which was Osama bin Laden's casus belli, but as the ancient sins of slavery, the eradication of Native Americans, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It would have been nice if Moyers had asked Wright, "Do you really believe that God was punishing us for our sins? How is that different from the conservative Evangelicals who say New York was being punished for its licentiousness?"

Moyers, who seems to be spending the rest of his life over-atoning for his service as Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam spokesman, occasionally betrayed an anachronistic liberal masochism in the interview. Indeed, Wright tried to balance his "God Damn America" sermon with the acknowledgment that you can say that sort of thing in America, "whereas some other places, you're dead if you say the wrong thing about your government." But instead of saying, "Amen, brother," Moyers replied, "Well, you can be almost crucified for saying what you've said ... in this country."

I wonder how Moyers reacted when he saw the Reverend's smug, disdainful, outrageous--Obama's word--performance a few days later at the National Press Club. Wright refused to back away from his contention that AIDS was a government conspiracy, said that attacking him was an attack on the black church, refused to step away from Louis Farrakhan and again said of Sept. 11, "You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you." Twenty years ago, the response of too many Moyers-era liberals would have been to try to understand Wright's anger--he surely does have a historical beef--rather than condemn it as distorted and dangerous. It was this sort of thinking that helped make the Republicans the dominant party of the past 40 years. The left believed it was all right for people like Wright to condemn white America but it was "blaming the victim" to criticize the antisocial behavior--the crime and family disintegration--going on in the black community. When Obama--the avatar of a new generation of progressives--stepped away from Wright, he stepped away from 40 years of liberal self-laceration.

For all the palpable good that Wright has done his community, his parishioners have paid a subtle price, especially the younger, poorer, less educated ones. When he spreads canards like the one about the AIDS conspiracy, he is telling them that white power is so overwhelming that it's almost impossible to succeed. The success of Obama's candidacy sends the very opposite message, which may be why Wright is so threatened by it. If Obama wins the presidency--if we can break past the barrier of race--there won't be much of a market for oppression-thumping orators like Jeremiah Wright.