April 28, 2008
The pastor comes to Washington — to blow up the Obama campaign.
By Byron York
Marion Barry is one politician who’s not going to distance himself
from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “It was a brilliant speech,” the former
mayor of Washington, D.C., told me after Wright’s appearance at the
National Press Club Monday morning. “I’ve read his sermons, I’ve been
to his church, so I know about him. It’s very clear most Americans
only know Jeremiah Wright through those 15-second soundbites, which is
ridiculous.”
Barry was echoing Wright’s own argument, often made by people who’ve
been caught saying something inappropriate, that his words had been
taken out of context. Monday, as Wright took the podium at the
National Press Club, insiders on both sides of the presidential
campaign were watching closely, waiting to learn more of that context;
maybe Wright would explain himself in a way that could defuse the
issue. “All those points that he had made that he had said were taken
out of context, and here he had this opportunity to provide the
additional context,” one GOP strategist told me. But it didn’t happen.
“Instead of putting them into some context, he seemed to reinforce
them,” the strategist said.
Wright’s performance not only left the Obama campaign scrambling to
respond. It left some Democratic politicos, unattached to either the
Obama or Clinton campaign, believing that Obama will have to abandon
his vow, made last month in his Philadelphia speech on race, that “I
can no more disown [Wright] than I can disown the black community.”
“I think he’s going to have to walk farther away from Wright, if he
wants to win the general election,” one Democratic strategist told me
Monday night. “He could say, ‘This is different now. Just to eliminate
any questions, I am going to leave this church, because I believe the
country is more important.’ It would say that Wright’s rhetoric has no
place in his campaign or the lives of his children.” (As the Wright
controversy has festered, observers on both sides of the political
divide have wondered, usually in whispers, about Obama’s decision to
take his young children to Wright’s church.)
So far, at least, Obama isn’t going there. “I just want to emphasize
that this is my former pastor,” he told reporters in Wilmington, N.C.
(The 66-year-old Wright is now a “senior pastor” at the church.) “Many
of the statements that he has made both to trigger this initial
controversy and that he’s made over the last several days are not
statements that I’ve heard him make previously. They don’t represent
my views and they don’t represent what this campaign is about.”
The Democratic strategist believes the Wright issue will continue to
trouble Obama through November, provided he finally dispatches Hillary
Clinton in the primaries. But on the other side, in the McCain
campaign, there has been some turmoil over how to handle the Wright
issue. A number of Republicans were dismayed when McCain condemned an
ad made by North Carolina Republicans tying a local candidate to Obama
and Wright. One southern GOP strategist told me he got a call over the
weekend from another well-connected Republican insider who moaned,
“What’s wrong with our guy? He’s turning into such a wuss.”
Many Republicans were relieved when McCain changed direction on
Sunday, latching onto Obama’s comment that Wright was a legitimate
topic of discussion and indicating that he won’t fight third-party
attempts to use the Wright issue. “Don’t look for Sen. McCain to put
it in his ads,” one source in the campaign told me. “Don’t look for
him to make speeches about it. But the reality is, this is part of the
fabric of the presidential campaign, and a lot of people have
questions about it.”
Meanwhile, at the Press Club, with that opportunity to contextualize
his controversial statements, Wright chose instead to dig in. On his
famous 9/11 “chickens coming home to roost” comment, he told the
audience that the United States is a terrorist nation that got what it
had coming on September 11. “To quote the Bible, ‘Be not deceived. God
is not mocked. For whatsoever you sow, that you also shall reap,’“
Wright said. “Jesus said, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do
unto you.’ You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never
to come back on you. Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah
Wright bombastic, divisive principles.”
Wright also held firm to his suggestion that the United States
government created the AIDS virus to kill black people. “Based on this
Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this
country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything,” he
said.
He even defended the most incendiary of his comments, “God damn
America.” “That’s biblical,” Wright said. “God doesn’t bless
everything. God condemns something — and d-e-m-n, ‘demn,’ is where we
get the word ‘damn.’ God damns some practices. And there is no excuse
for the things that the government, not the American people, have
done. That doesn’t make me not like America or unpatriotic.”
All of that was on top of a speech Wright gave last night to the
Detroit chapter of the NAACP, in which he wandered all over the
landscape, volunteering his opinions on the abilities of white
children to learn logically and analytically, while black children
learn orally and creatively (they’re especially good, Wright said,
with hip-hop lyrics); on the varieties of spoken English, complete
with Wright’s impersonation of John F. Kennedy; on black and white
perceptions of music; on dancing, and much, much more. It was a speech
that might be at times called “fiery.”
Wright’s address to the Press Club, at least at the beginning, was
just the opposite, a serious lecture on black religion that went heavy
on words like “hermeneutics” and “homiletics” and “foci.” If Wright
had stopped at the end of his prepared remarks, no one would have had
any news to report. But then there was a question-and-answer session,
and Wright held forth.
The crowd loved it. Wright was at the Press Club as the guest of an
organization called the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, a group
founded in 2003, in the words of its mission statement, “to strengthen
the capacity and network of the African American faith community.”
Inside the room, there was a somewhat awkward divide between
journalists and the ministers and others who had come as part of the
conference. In the back of the room was a row of cameras, in balconies
on either side there were groups of print reporters, and in the middle
were the conference attendees, including Barry, Cornel West, and
officials from the Nation of Islam. They gave Wright a loud and
friendly reception, while the reporters sat mostly stone-faced.
It was a quiet clash of cultures, one that Marion Barry has seen
before. “Take his preaching style,” Barry told me. “A lot of white
people think he is screaming and yelling. I’ve heard that from my
white friends: Why does he have to scream so much? But that’s the
preaching style of the black church. He came out of the black church.
This did a great deal to educate America on the issue of the black
church, liberation theology, and it put in context all that he talked
about.”
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