SlateV has this three minute video of Jeremiah Wright fulminating while 799 voters (African-Americans, Democrats, Independents, and Republicans) register their opinions as he talks.
http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/271557392
As you can see, without even listening to Wright, white people don’t like what he has to say. Me, I actually agree with quite a bit of it, like the accusations about the evil of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and about state terrorism. (But people as far to the left as I am don’t decide elections.) On the other hand, I’ll concede that Wright is … out there. The idea that our government invented the HIV virus to infect people of color is just loony.
One viewing of that video and many Democrats will worry that an Obama presidency will be about race rather than the economy or the war in Iraq. I don’t prefer Clinton over Obama or the other way around. But I do say that a video like this is so inflammatory that Obama cannot defeat McCain.
The Republicans are such accomplished screamers that they will move into hyper-howl mode and stay there until November.
So what if McCain doesn’t know the difference between Sunnis and Shias, as Howard Dean’s latest missive points out: “At least five times as a candidate John McCain has stated that Iran (a Shiite nation) is supporting Al-Qaeda (a Sunni group) in Iraq. This is not some minor mistake, but a significant gaffe. He clearly does not understand the sensitive political dynamics in that region of the world.”
So what if McCain wants people facing foreclosure to get a second job? So what if McCain favors privatizing Social Security? So what if McCain was one of the Keating Five? That’s ancient history.
So what if, so what if, so what if? We won’t scream with the same frenzy as Republicans do. When Jerry Falwell proclaimed that God sent 9/11 as punishment for American’s sinful ways, when Pat Robertson cozied up to Charles Taylor, the Liberian dictator/murderer, we didn’t take the Republicans to the mattress about the rightwing nuttiness that infests their party. We didn’t get the media plugged in and harping on it.
Republicans’re better shriekers and better haters.
The press loves McCain, and the press loves any confrontation that the Rs stir up. The drama of watching Obama try to defend himself from Wright’s rantings, oh the mainstream media is going to feast off that plate for months.
And this issue, this video, oh geez. It’s tailor-made for the GOP. It plays to every fear Americans have about race. The Willie Horton/Dukakis smear will seem like a lighted Bic next to Mt. Aetna.
I’m not trying to sandbag Obama. I’m not a fan of his, but I’m not a fan of Hillary’s either. But I’ll tell you who I’m really not a fan of: any Republican and McCain in particular. And I worry that Obama has the nomination sewn up–but not the election.
but that didn’t save them in the congressional elections in 2006. In race after race, they tried their usual playbook of the “Defeatocrats want to legalize gay marriage, roll over against Osama, and throw open the doors to illegal aliens, and raise your taxes to do it.” It didn’t work.
Wright isn’t running for president, Obama is. Even after the Wright story, Obama still leads McCain in most national stories. It will be old news in the fall, and networks won’t cover it again. So I’m not sure what this video proves.
This post is, like, so three weeks ago.
Republicans have been playing the fear card for a long time now and people are tired of it. I think that people are more likely to vote on the actual issues this election than any one in recent memory.
By the way, considering that Obama has the nomination locked up, what’s the point of worrying about electability in the G.E.?
this will be really old news–it probahbly already is. I am actually glad that it came up when it did so we can get it out of the way. It will have done damage, of course, and may continue to do some since I am sure that, if Obama is really the nominee, the Republicans will drag it out again and try to milk it, but there would be something that could be used in this way no matter who the candidate is.
The real news today, of course, is the Obama “bitter” comments–but funny thing, when I read the comments on the CNN site I linked to above I found that a huge majority people were agreeing with him! By a large margin responders expressed a belief that they had lots to be bitter about and that Obama was not condescending when he spoke for them. I don’t know if this will last, but perhaps it is possible that we underestimate people’s intelligence (although the fact that GWB was elected twice does give one pause).
Democrats haven’t had the racist vote for at least a generation. The Democratic Party began to be hostile to white racists since 1948.
Let’s also remember that since 1948 only one Democrat elected President received over 50% of the white vote: Johnson in 1964.
In the end, who is speaking in this tape? It is not Obama.
With a war going badly in Iraq, with a health care crisis, with the country being in the midst of a recession, and with a Republican who wants to make tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans permanent, I don’t think this will work for a majority of Americans. And, for those who this tape persuades, they have not voted for a Democrat in decades.
I hope that WHEN (not if because it is going to happen) Obama officially becomes the nominee that a lot of white Democrats put an Obama bumpersticker on their cars and start wearing Obama pins. We white people must not be afraid to show our support for the skinny black guy with the funny name, big ears and who can’t bowl.
run by the Republicans in ads. I think we’ll see it less on media news shows simply because by then it’s old news – heck it’s pretty much old news now.
But last week I was talking to a Republican friend of mine who was a McCain supporter back in 2000. (He did vote for Kerry in 2004 because he was so angry at Bush). Before supertuesday he told me he could never vote for either of the Dems this time. Last week he told me he’ll vote for Obama over McCain in November. He’s been impressed by his campaign. But specifically he was impressed by Obama’s speech in response to the Wright controversy.
So yes it will be an issue, but it will also be an opportunity. Because it isn’t Obama saying those things on the screen.
Oh – and the hard core white racists? They weren’t going to vote for a Dem anyway. They haven’t since 1964.
I think that, as Democrats, we have become conditioned over the last seven years (maybe even longer)to despair. We’ve seen it happen over and over that we pick a candidate and the Republican slime machine goes into attack mode and the slime machine works. We’ve seen it work on absolute lies – like when John Kerry was swiftboated. We’ve seen it work on fibs – like when the Republicans poked fun at Gore for “inventing the internet”.
We’ve seen our candidates be portrayed over and over by the Republicans as weak. And we’ve seen the media go along with that narrative and that narrative spells doom.
And whether we ourselves believe that our candidates are weak or not, we worry. Because we know that a media narrative can doom a candidate.
I know that I’ve been frustrated by many of our candidates for higher office, including Gore and Kerry, because I thought they should have figured out a way to change the narrative. After all, they had the facts on their side.
So when we see video like Jeremiah Wright (or Hillary’s Bosnia video) we picture to ourselves how the right wing media is going to use it in the fall and how they will shape the narrative and we have no confidence that our candidate will be able to change that media narrative.
But we need to step back this year and stop the cycle of our own gloom. Yes, we need to be cognizant of the risk to Obama from this video but we need to watch how he responds to it and how he shifted the media narrative on it. We need to watch how he shifts the media narrative on other issues that come back. And we need to control our panic and NOT feed into the Republican media narrative and not automatically buy into the common wisdom that that some piece of video will DOOM our candidate (whether it is Obama or Hillary).
I was just reading Matt Yglesias’ take on this latest attack by McCain against Obama on the ‘bitter’ controversy. A statement that Obama made that was absolutely true but that he said inartfully. It is now being used against him by John McCain. Yglesias, examining Obama’s response says and I agree:
Obama isn’t Gore or Kerry. For good or for bad he’s not Gore or Kerry. They were stronger on many issues. But they were weak on media narrative. Obama has so far shown strength on media narrative and we need to recognize that and support that if he is our nominee.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. And as I would say, ain’t groveling in public a bitch.
You all have convinced me that I jumped the gun and made an overbroad generalization. The upside is that this is a topic where I couldn’t be happier to be wrong. The only excuse I have to offer is that I’m so focused on state politics now that I’m uninformed about national politics. So I’ll stick to the state stuff.
Mary, I followed the link you gave and read up on the “bitter” controversy and was impressed with how Obama handled it. Seeing him stand his ground made me feel much better about his probable candidacy. And I appreciated your comment about how we’ve been conditioned by weak kneed candidates to think the next candidate will fold. My jaw has sagged so often these last eight years when Democrats have backed down. I still remember getting upset by Durbin’s apology after he likened Guantanamo to a Gulag. I was outraged that he apologized for a statement that was right on.
Anyway. Mea culpa. Now about that stinkin’ Jim Lembke.
Seen the national polls showing Obama in the lead regardless? Even the pundits are amazed that the Rev. Wright clips haven’t had the anticipated effects. Perhaps ‘they’ don’t realize that, in the real world, regular church goers have to forgive their own pastor’s (priest’s, rabbi’s) human frailties/dumb statements all the time.
According to a recent article in Newsweek, this church has 8500 members. It only seats 2500. Therefore, three services are held every Sunday. Note that this minister, who has delivered thousands of sermons over a 20+ year period, is being vilified for a few statements made out of context.
During all the reportage, I’ve rarely seen references to the infamous Tuskegee Experiment or to the revelations during the Iran-Contra Hearings about the use of crack cocaine sales to generate revenue after Congress shut down finding. To those who know the pertinent history, Rev. Wright’s statements about HIV/AIDS don’t look quite so ‘loony’. Besides, the point of his sermons (and his ministry) was overcoming and excelling regardless of obstacles (not the obstacles themselves).
Only Sally Quinn, of the Washington Post, has observed that Rev. Wright is highly respected by other clergymen within this denomination (United Church of Christ, whose membership is 99% Caucasian) and in reminding us about Rev. Billy Graham’s Anti-Semitic statements on the Nixon tapes. Christians forgave (and forgot about) him; they are Biblically required to do the same for Rev. Wright.
To borrow from the historian, Nell Irwin Painter, this is a big country; it takes time for our citizens (most of whose time is consumed by commuting, work and family obligations) to catch on. Hillary may be able to roll out the party loyalists but I think it’s interesting to watch the numbers change as the targeted group is exposed to his agenda.
Now I’m waiting to see how long it takes for the facts behind Obama’s so called ‘elitism’ come out. For those who don’t know his bio, after graduating from Harvard & Columbia, Obama chose to work for pitiful wages for a church group in an area of Chicago which was economically depressed after factory closures.
thread above, it struck me that nobody commenting above has brought up the Obama response to either the Wright or the bittergate brouhaha–responses which strike me in both cases as brilliant.
I think that Obama’s response to to the Wright noise, his now-famous speech, was what moved me from a fairly neutral to a passionate supporter. He behaved just as I have been waiting to see a politician behave–he did not retreat into focus group approved bromides, but told us how he felt about race–he acted as if he trusted us to hear a real, authentic response. Even more remarkably, what he had to say about the topic resonnated with me, a middle-aged, white woman. I too have been present when people whom I love and respect express ugly, negative thoughts or irrational fears about other races. Although I abhor this part of their thinking, I would never think of renouncing the individuals. Meanwhile, his surrogates made sure that we understood that HRC was beating the Wright drum a little too heavily.
In the same way, instead of hyperventilating, retreating to the tried-and-true political responses, he responded in an honest, forthright, but still extremely balanced way to the bitter comments–he clarified the meaning, actually apologized (imagine HRC apoligizing) if they offended anyone, and went on to emphazise the bitter component (as opposed to the cling to religion, guns, etc. part), using it to express the populist point of view hat has actually mobilized a large part of the oldline “Reagan Democrats” to at least begin to think about returning to the fold. And as with the Wright controversy, his surrogates have been busy, organizing a petition, emphasizing the reasons why folks may be bitter in Pennsylvania, etc.
Obama has allowed himself to respond, albeit gently, to HRC and McBush’s bittergate drum-beating, by laughing at HRC’s rather pathetic pandering (throwing back boiler-makers with the boys) and McBush’s total ineffectuality vis-a-vis the economic situation of working people.
All of this speaks very well to his ability to deal with the bankrupt and very predictable Republican machine once/if the nomination is decided in his favor, as well as reinforcing the evidence of his executive ability that his extremely well-run campaign has already created.