Discriminations

[NOTE: This post has been UPDATEd]

Prevarication often leads to contradiction. When you don’t tell the truth, it’s hard to keep your story straight.

Rev. Wright on Bill Moyers show last Friday:

BILL MOYERS: You know, you mentioned Senator Obama. In the 20 years that you’ve been your [sic] pastor, have you ever heard him repeat any of your controversial statements as his opinion?

REVEREND WRIGHT: No. No. No. Absolutely not. I don’t talk to him about politics. And so here at a political event, he goes out as a politician and says what he has to say as a politician. I continue to be a pastor who speaks to the people of god about the things of God. [Emphasis added]

Rev. Wright at the National Press Club on Monday:

And I said to Barack Obama, last year, “If you get elected, November the 5th, I’m coming after you, because you’ll be representing a government whose policies grind under people.” All right? It’s about policy, not the American people.

Imagine what Wright would say to Obama if he did talk about politics.

UPDATE

Wright, of course, is not the only prevaricator in this sad affair. As Karl Rove observed yesterday, discussing Obama’s various responses to the mentor he is now pleased to call his “former pastor”:

Well, look, his problem is that we’ve had four different stories from him. On the 13th of March, he came out and said, “There’s nothing particularly controversial in Reverend Wright’s statements.” Then he said he wasn’t in the pews when those controversial things were said. Two days later, he came out and said in a speech in Philadelphia that what ... Reverend Wright said was reprehensible but he could no more disavow him than he could disavow his own grandmother [jsr: although he did remove him from his religious advisory committee]. Then, 10 days after that, he said, “Well, if Reverend Wright had not been retiring,” then maybe, he, Obama would have left the church.

It is important to note, however, that Rev. Wrong is right about one thing: the controversy is not about him. But Wright is wrong about what it is about, since it’s also not about “the black church.” [Does Wright think he’s the Black Pope? I didn’t think we had a “black church.”] As I argued here, it’s about who is the real Obama.

One of the most revealing things about the current media storm over Wright is the way most of it unwittingly but revealingly portrays Obama as a victim of the mean, nasty, egotistical Wright. Poor Obama. Such a nice guy! Such a nice post-racial, post-divisive campaign! Poor Obama, poor us for possibly losing our savior to Wright’s insistence on nailing him to the cross of “the black church.”

Lost in this new crucifixion melodrama is any sense that Obama is responsible for what is happening to him (even that construction unfairly makes him a victim). Obama chose this man, his church, and his vision. Perhaps he did so only instrumentally, as a politician (and a conventional, not a new, one) on the make, but he stayed a loyal and docile member of the flock. He didn’t have to do that. He could have left at any time.

Lie down with Wrights; wake up with wrongs. Obama made his own bed; no one forced him to, or forced him to stay (unless Michelle...). As a result of his own actions this post-racial, post-divisive candidate has exacerbated more racial, religious, and cultural (“bitter/cling”) strife into our politics than anyone on the national stage since George Wallace.

UPDATE: Obama, Loyalty, And Betrayal [4 May]

This week Matthew Continneti has an excellent article in The Weekly Standard arguing in effect that Wright is right ... about Obama. Like Karl Rove (quoted above), Continneti too lists a litany of Obamian contradictions re Wright:

 “These days, [Obama] says, he attends the 11 a.m. Sunday service at Trinity .  .  . every week. .  .  . His pastor, Wright, has become a close confidant.” (Chicago Sun-Times, April 5, 2004)

• “Senator Obama is proud of his pastor and his church.’ ” (Obama campaign statement reported in the New York Times, April 30, 2007)

• “[Wright] is like an old uncle who sometimes will say things I don’t agree with.” (February 25, 2008)

• “I don’t think that my church is actually particularly controversial.” (March 2, 2008)

• “I can no more disown [Wright] than I can disown the black community.” (March 18, 2008)

• “I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw yesterday. .  .  . The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago.” (April 29, 2008)
  

As is usually the case in matters like this, the dissembling and outright prevarication is more troubling than the original offense (assuming Obama’s 20+ year close association with Wright to be an offense). But I suspect there may be something even more troubling on display here than Obama’s close connection to a lefty nutjob and his clumsy attempts to escape its consequences.

Consider: Obama was raised, apparently with love and affection, by his white mother and, even more so, by his white grandparents. Nevertheless, in his young adulthood he decided to abandon or at least minimize his bi-racialism and identify completely as a black man. Recently, in campaign mode crisis management, he decided to in effect to equate the views of his white grandmother, “a typical white person,” with Wright’s racial rants, famously saying he couldn’t “disown” either.

Of course that comment about his grandmother was widely regarded as pretty disowning, and now Obama has shown he was in fact equally capable of disowning Wright when his consistent views were “amplified” at the National Press Club loudly enough for everyone to hear. Is it possible, however, to sever his connection with Wright without also severing his ties to Wright’s congregation, a congregation in which he was a loyal member until the pastor became too embarrassing?

I don’t think so. Although I haven’t seen any news reports investigating this question, I would guess that Wright’s current and continuing congregants don’t feel they themselves were very well treated by Obama’s about face.

Thus I don’t think it’s going too far to say that Obama has been disloyal to the two communities that raised and nurtured him, no doubt with an eye on both occasions to his being accepted by a new community that would better serve his personal ambitions.

What if he succeeds? That is, what if he is accepted by the larger community with which he wants to identify, that of the United States as a whole, is elected president ... and then at some point in the future gets a better offer? Will he then treat the rest of us the way he’s treated his white family and his black pastor and his flock?