Was it a setup? That’s the question on cynical political observers’ minds after watching the Barack Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright saga play out on television this week. Wright, pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago and Obama’s spiritual mentor, returned to the national spotlight with a series of media appearances during which he repeated and amplified controversial remarks from several of his sermons. The sermons were first brought to light more than a month ago and had begun to be eclipsed by other campaign news, some of it of Obama’s making, until this week. The timing of Wright’s return is questionable and leaves open the possibility that the Senator and the Reverend have engaged in a political conspiracy worthy of any adjective that the left has ever hurled at Karl Rove.
Here’s how the theory goes. When Wright’s controversial sermons–in which he said that AIDS was a creation of the Federal government to kill blacks, said the United States brought the September 11th terrorist attacks upon itself, and called on God to damn America, among other things–were made public, the Obama campaign took the occasion to have the candidate make a big speech on race relations. The speech was delivered in Philadelphia, the better to help Obama calm the fears of rural, white, working-class Democrats, to whom he now looked a little more like a sixties radical than an agent of a new kind of politics. It was expected that Obama would distance himself from his firebrand pastor. But he didn’t. In that now famous speech, Obama said that Rev. Wright was a, “part of me,” and that he, “could no more denounce him than I could denounce the black community.” Far from distancing himself, Obama drew closer to Wright with those words.
That was right after the Ohio and Texas primaries which Sen. Hillary Clinton won, saving her campaign. Obama had some six weeks to convince Pennsylvanians that his relationship with Wright was an anomaly; not a reflection on his judgment. But then Obama made an appearance at a San Francisco-area fund raiser in which he was quoted as saying that rural townspeople were, “bitter,” about economic conditions in their areas and, “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them,” out of frustration. Those comments made Obama seem like an elitist, looking down on the little people in the small towns all across America. Combined with the suspicion engendered by Wright’s comments and Obama’s refusal to disavow them, it made for a perfect political storm for the candidate of hope and change.
Obama lost Pennsylvania by 10 points on April 22nd. But more revealing is the way he lost. In every rural county in the state, Clinton bested Obama by at least 60-40. He lost whites in every age category, he lost churchgoers of every denomination and frequency of attendance, he lost every age group over 40, and he lost Catholics by as much as 50 points. Faced with the sudden realization that his campaign was foundering among rural whites, and with four heavily rural states next to vote, Obama needed a way to reach out to that crucial Democratic demographic.
But for the post-partisan Obama to suddenly turn on his pastor, mentor, and friend of more than 20 years would have seemed too opportunistic, too old politics. He needed to find a way to denounce Wright without having it be seen as politically motivated. The new controversy spawned by Wright’s renewed complaints and charges appears to have done the trick. Wright has always known that the day would come when Obama would have to cast him aside. He told the New York Times almost a year ago to the day that if Obama becomes the Democratic nominee, “…he might have to publicly distance himself from me.” Wright may have made that distancing possible this week.
Less cynical observers say that the new Wright controversy is too damaging for Obama’s campaign to be a political ploy. They say that Wright is genuinely angry at Obama for the Philadelphia speech, and that Obama was truly offended by Wright’s assertion that Obama was only disowning him, “based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls.” They say that Wright is now trying to destroy Obama’s campaign. If those pundits are right, then it would be expected that Wright would appear again, sometime before Tuesday’s critical North Carolina primary, with more controversial statements, or a denunciation of his own against Obama. But it has been three days since Obama’s dismissal of Wright, and there has been no word from the Reverend. If Wright remains silent through Monday, consider it a certainty that he is executing a plan designed to give Obama the political cover to opportunistically deny him. There may never be proof of coordination, but there seems to be a lot of winking and nodding going on.
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Mark Impomeni is a contributing editor at RedState and covers the White House for AOL’s new political blog, The Political Machine. He writes a column with a conservative’s take on the state of the 2008 presidential race for Political-Buzz.com.
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