After the Future

Power and Change

Now that Obama's election is looking more likely, my thoughts are moving toward the question whether, in fact, he can make a difference. The strong support for Hillary among Democrats is very potent evidence that almost half of rank and file Democrats either don't have a clue how power works in this country, or if they do, that they are ok with it. Clearly the Clintons don't offer the possibility of a significant shift away from the policies of the militarist power elite that have dominated this country since at least the time of Reagan. 

I think Obama does. He has a clue and I don't think he's ok with it, but that doesn't mean when he's president he can do anything about it. Will he have the power base to reverse the policies of the country's power elite over the last thirty years?  "Change" is his motto, but real change does not happen top down; it has to have a bottom up thrust, and quite frankly, while most Americans are fed up with the Republicans, there isn't a very potent broad-based, well organized, focussed and well-funded opposition to the agenda of the power elite that dominates our political class that I'm aware of. It certainly is not the agenda of the Democratic Party. So where does Obama's power to change anything come from?

We know the the Republicans are absolutely ridiculous when it comes to their alignment with the interests of the country's militarist wealth and power elites, but we also know that the Democrats as a whole, and certainly the one's in elective office, do not represent a potent opposition, either in their thinking or in their will to stand up against the forces in this country that are destroying it. While a decent guy like Sherrod Brown has since repented of his vote for the Military Commissions Act, the very fact that he voted for it to begin with tells us how things work. It's flabbergasting. When even the good guys vote for bills like that, what does it say about our process? Do these people have even the remotest clue of what is going on? If these people are so easily manipulated, what hope is there for the rest of the electorate to understand what is happening?

So as I have written here, Obama's emergence has given me reason to feel an optimism even a year ago I would have thought unimaginable. It shows that the system is not so tight as to prevent such a thing, which is a very encouraging sign.  But that does not mean I am naive about what I think he can realistically accomplish. Obama has enormous upside potential, but that potential will not be realized unless he develops a power base that will enable him effectively to confront the already enormously powerful entrenched interests that will fight him tooth and nail.

The power he needs must derive from broad, committed support in the electorate, and while he might be able to get that over an eight-year period, he certainly doesn't have it now, and if elected, it will be very tough going in the beginning. It's one thing for Americans to feel disaffection with the current administration; it's quite another thing them to have the will to do something to reverse the enormity of what it has effected in the last eight years.  If there is a will to do it, I'm  not seeing it as very broad based, at least not yet.

Americans in general are unsophisticated about how power works. In large part this is because they live in a world where their political imaginations are shaped by discourse in the MSM--even the so-called liberal MSM like the New York Times, NBC, or even NPR/PBS. Tom Friedman or Charlie 'the-surge-is-working' Rose are the paradigm. The latter a decent, seemingly open-minded, better-than-Larry-King, but frequently out of-his-depth guy who is so entrenched among the nation's power elite he has no real critical perspective. Moyers is more incisive.

Power defines reality, certainly in the MSM, and so the MSM has a conscious/unconscious vested interest in making our politics seem as though it's a personality contest rather than a conflict of interests. The MSM has its own interests, and certainly among them is to disguise how those interests are aligned with those of the militarist power elite.  For that reason it has an interest in diverting the public's attention away from how the country really works.  And as long as the country stays so diverted, the power arrangements as they currently exist go unchallenged no matter who's in office.

The Race Card

If there was any doubt she was playing it since South Carolina, it should now be dispelled.  This woman is made rabid by her obsession with power:

In a jaw-dropping interview in USA Today on Thursday, she said, "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on." As evidence she cited an Associated Press report that, she said, "found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

White Americans? Hard-working white Americans? "Even Richard Nixon didn't say white," an Obama supporter said, "even with the Southern strategy."

If John McCain said, "I got the white vote, baby!" his candidacy would be over. And rising in highest indignation against him would be the old Democratic Party.

To play the race card as Mrs. Clinton has, to highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical "the black guy can't win but the white girl can" is -- well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.

"She has unleashed the gates of hell," a longtime party leader told me. "She's saying, 'He's not one of us.'"

Any thought of putting her on the ticket in a nightmare team should be dispelled forever.  She no longer deserves even that. Democrats who still think this woman has any basic decency or that even a square inch of her soul isn't given over to political calculation are as clueless as those Republicans who thought George Bush was a strong, decisive leader.

Preferring Clinton is not the same as rejecting Obama.  To suggest that these white voters will not vote for Obama in the general is about as blatant a play on race as you can get.  Is race a factor for some of these voters?  Sure. But to think that this is the only consideration is insulting to them, to Obama, and to the superdelegate whom she hopes to sway with such a perverse argument.

This excerpt above is from a column by Peggy Noonan of all people.  In it she points out that the only faction within the Democratic Party that can politically euthanize Hillary is the women.  But Feinstein backed off and Mikulski says she's  still behind her. Maybe if we all just ignore her she'll just go away. This whole thing is going to work itself out.  And we should all be grateful that we will not have to live with this sad, self-absorbed, robotically calculating woman as our president for another four or eight years.  I don't know if this little film was made with her in mind, but it sure resonates after the last several weeks:

Quote of the Day: Joe Klein

Clinton's apparent loss of the nomination was a consequence of her campaign's incompetence, but it was also a result of her reliance on the same-old. The shameless populism that seemed a possible game changer to media observers, micro-ideas like the gas-tax holiday, the willingness to go negative — which Obama tried intermittently, in halfhearted reaction to Clinton's attacks — appeared very old and clichéd to Obama's legion of young supporters, who were the real game changers in this year of extraordinary turnouts. That, and the fact that Democrats have been the party of government, tragically hooked on the high-minded: they don't react well to flagrant pandering or character assassination. This has been a losing position these past 40 years, and the media — like pollsters and political consultants — tend to look in the rearview mirror and pretend to see the future.  Read more.

A truism about the establishment is that the world in which it operates is the already established.  And the people who have succeeded and made their careers in that already established world mistakenly assume that it rigidly defines the limits of possibility. Hillary and her campaigns are establishment creatures, and that's why she did not take, even now cannot take, Obama seriously. They are not oriented at all to the future but to a restoration of the '90s. And the voters who have instinctively supported Clinton are those who accept this establishment-centered understanding of political reality, and similarly are unable to take Obama seriously.  They see him as an idealist will-o'-the-the-wisp. 

These establishment oriented types thought earlier this year that Obama and his campaign would evaporate in the heat of front-runner scrutiny.  They have been incapable of seeing what he represents because they can only see the future in the rear-view mirror. This statement by Klein is unusual for him, because he is as predictably establishment in his perceptions and judgments as any Beltway courtier you might read. He's one of these journalists who still thinks of McCain as a respectable, honorable candidate. So it will be interesting to see if his perceptions change as the Obama contest with McCain evolves.

My guess is that he and his cohort will will continue to give too much credit to the old tired ways.  They have yet to learn what "game changing" really means, because Obama represents a new impulse that has more power and substance than they, in their rear-view mirror perspective, are capable of grasping. The old interpretive framework that has provided valid predictable interpretations for the past forthy years has now become obsolete.

Profile(s) of an Obamacan (Updated)

David Brooks is wrong about Obama  having been pushed to the far left.  He will easily reoccupy the territory claimed by Hillary once she leaves the field. Former Republican John Cole exemplifies the attitude that will sway the sane people in the middle and middle-right toward Obama.  He wants to send the far right extremists back to the fringes where they belong.  McCain, it should be clear to anyone paying attention, is too eager to play ball with the extreme right:

You see, I still have my “Peace Through Strength” button from when I campaigned for Reagan. I believed in limited government, I believed in a strong national defense, I believed in fiscal restraint and balanced budgets and I believed in personal integrity and individual liberty and personal freedom.

I am pissed. I want the frothing nutters, the fraudulent hucksters, the race-baiters, the anti-science frauds, the anti-intellectuals, the gay-bashers, the big-money cheats, the torture fetishists, the religious nuts, the tax and spenders, the xenophobes, and the phonies to pay. I want payback. I want the people who ruined my former party relegated to permanent minority status. I know I am a newly minted Democrat, and, as such, it is ballsy for me to start telling you what I want from the party, but this is my website and you are just going to have to deal with my opinion.

I am under no illusion I will buy into everything Barack Obama puts forward, but I am damned sure convinced he is a decent man who, at the very least, will restore a sense of competence to the national stage. I am willing to meet most Democrats half-way, and I am already doing everything I can to get this man elected. I think Obama will act in good faith for this nation, and I am responding in kind. His policies are not outlandish or crazy or uber-left- they reflect a rational, and I would argue, a decent and progressive way forward out of the mess I helped to create. I won’t like all of them, and I will not agree with all of them, but there is no chance that I will ever be President, so perfect agreement is never a possibility.

And don’t get me wrong- I am not for Obama because of what I am against. I am for Obama because he is a decent man, a break from the past, and really a once in a lifetime opportunity. He has treated us like adults throughout this primary, and it is time to act like adults. There will be times we feel he lets us all down, but we are not electing a diety. We are electing a leader, and Obama is that leader. It is time to get past the bullshit of the last 20 years, the battles I am really tired of fighting, and time to turn our attention to the really important issues of the day- the economy, the budget, our international presence, our crumbling infrastructure, our military, medicare and medicaid and social security, and on and on and on.

If Barack Obama was not your your preferred candidate, I am sorry that person did not win, but it is time to remember that the target is John McCain and the Bush/Cheney way of doing things. If you can not accept that and help move us forward, please at least get out of the way.

***

UPDATE: By way of Greenwald in a post in which he defends sane conservative Catholics:

Long-time right-wing advocate and prominent devout Catholic Doug Kmiec (formerly Dean of Catholic University and a Professor at the University of Notre Dame School of Law) recently endorsed Barack Obama and made several of these points:

As a Catholic looking at candidates, my faith instructs me to look at the whole person respective to the church's social teaching on wages, education, issues of family, culture, responsibility toward the environment, the reduction of mindless or excess consumption. And the Catholic Church was quite explicit about the concept of preemptive war being contrary to the principles of just war. One of the things that happened to Catholics over the last two decades is because of the evil of abortion, we've been somewhat less mindful of the need to serve those around us -- those who are calling upon us for assistance in a tangible way. . . .

When I look at Obama's eloquent speeches, his references to Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King, those are so much a part of modern Catholic education. And the preferential option for the poor or solidarity with the poor, how that is not heard by the Catholic mind has troubled me. So one of the reasons for speaking out at this point, and one of the reasons to speak out on Easter Sunday, is to have my fellow Catholics reexamine this topic and listen with more careful ear.

Kmiec was the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the both the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations. 

See more on Kmiec here. Please forward to me other examples of articulate Obamacans you come across.  I'll start a recurring post on the subject.

P.S. About the abortion issue and Catholics.  Kmiec's attitude represents an attitude very similar to my own.  I think that unless you have sincerely thought it through and are personally convinced that the human fetus at any stage has the same ontological status as one's gall bladder, then abortion should be a profoundly troubling public moral issue.  That isn't to say that it's black and white or that there are simplistic answers.

I think that what bothers people like me is this assumption by so many liberals that abortion should be considered an exclusively private matter, that it has no social ethical dimension to it, and anybody who thinks differently should just get over it.  Nevertheless, those Christians who make it the litmus test for whether they can vote for someone are the same types who probably would have supported fascists like Franco or Mussolini because of their anti-abortion positions.  It's more than ridiculously simple-minded; it's an abdication of one's capacity for moral discernment, and more often than not leads people into naive support for other even more serious forms of social evil.

Indiana and North Carolina (Updated)

11: 00 AM PT: Hoosiers and Tarheels, lend me your ears. Please, please, please put this desperate, flailing, power-crazed and craven Clinton campaign out of its misery, and put the rest of the country in a position in which it can move forward. Is it too much too ask? Why put off the inevitable? The sooner the Clintons fall into the background only rarely to be heard from again the better off we all shall be. Vote for the future.  Give the superdelegates the pretext they are looking for to come out for Obama.  And let's move on.

Usually we have to hold our noses and settle for the less horrible choice, but this year we have another possibility. You can put an end to even the slightest possibility of staying stuck in this politics as usual if you can just bring yourself to send Clinton packing.

***

UPDATED 10:30 PM PT: I was busy most of the evening so didn't pay close attention to the unfolding of the vote count.  I guess I'm mostly relieved at the results. It's a good night for Obama. Let's hope the results tonight embolden reticent superdelegates to come out for Obama and funders to back away from Clinton.

I saw snatches of Hillary's speech, and it was interesting to look at Bill standing behind her. He was a million miles away, and it's probably clear to him now, if it wasn't before, that there is no hope, no argument, no reason to keep on. Let's all hope as the reality sinks in over the next week, and that they will back off and let the country take the next step forward.

The Post-American World (Updated)

I found the Fareed Zakaria interview with Charlie Rose very helpful:

Zakaria is hardly a  man of the left.  He supported the war, but now believes it was a horrible mistake. He's pro free trade. At some point when we have sane leadership, we can get into a deeper discussion of trade policy.  It's a critical subject, and it's not an either/or kind of thing. It's just that this administration has created so many other issues that outweigh trade policy in importance, that it seems hardly worth talking about. We have to worry first about unshredding the constitution, then we can worry about America's role in the world.

But Zakaria supports what I have believed from the beginning: that this obsession with Islamo-fascism is an absurd distraction and a huge waste of time, lives, and resources. It's a police problem, not a military one.  And while we're obsessed with our Moby Dick, the world moves on.

Our current mentality and the policies that follow from it is making us a joke and increasingly an irrelevancy. Zakaria's point is that the world wants us to lead, but if we can't, to get out of the way.  The world will find a way to do its thing without us.

***

UPDATE: Zakaria's book is being discussed this week at TPM Cafe Book Club. I think that the one weakness that should emerge in Zakaria's analysis is his tone-deafness to wealth and power distribution upward.  Haven't read the book yet, but some things he has said suggest this is a problem for him.

May the Force Be with Him

Just saw this at Balloon Juice.  Parts are laugh out loud funny:

Who's a real American? (Updated)

This contest is more than about Obama and his policies: it's about defining what it means to be an American.  Nobody gets that upset with Hagee or Robertson or any number of white religious figures who make outrageous statements because nobody questions that they are Americans. Jeremiah Wright?  A lot of us Americans have a hard time thinking of him as a real American. And Obama's association with him feeds into the doubts so many have whether in fact he is a 'real' American:

According to Smith College professor Paula Giddings, author of a new biography of Ida B. Wells, Ida: A Sword Among Lions and the Campaign Against Lynching, Wright's angry invocation of race and nation tapped into a reservoir of doubt about the very Americanness of African-Americans. "American citizenship has always been racialized as white. Who is a true American? Are African-Americans true Americans? That has been the question," she says.

In Obama's case--given his mixed-race lineage, his Kenyan father, his experiences growing up in Indonesia, his middle name (Hussein)--questions about his devotion to America carry a special potency, as xenophobia mingles with racism to create a poisonous brew. The toxicity is further heightened in this post-9/11 atmosphere, in which an image of Obama in Somali dress is understood as a slur and e-mails claiming that he is a "secret Muslim" schooled in a madrassa spread virally, along with rumors that he took the oath of office on a Koran. The madrassa and Koran canards have been thoroughly debunked, but still they persist--and few have been willing to stand up and say, So what if he was a Muslim? For her part, Clinton, asked on 60 Minutes whether Obama was a Muslim, said, "There is nothing to base that on, as far as I know."

Giddings calls the Wright association a "litmus test" that Obama must pass, saying, "It will be interesting to see if a man of color, a man who's cosmopolitan, can be the quintessential symbol of America" as its President. Read more. From Betsy Reed in The Nation. 

I've used that idea of a "test" in the comment section of one of my earlier posts this week.  It's a test certainly for Obama, but it is a test for the American electorate as well. For we are all being tested as to what we really believe it means to be an American. Are enough of us capable of recognizing that Jeremiah Wright is an honest American with whom we may agree or disagree but has just as much right to speak his mind in the public sphere as James Dobson, John Hagee or Pat Robertson? The comparison unfairly diminishes Wright, whom I think the best man among them. But the point should be clear. There's no media frenzy about white preachers who say outrageous things because there is no question about their bona fides as Americans.

I see Wright as forcing the issue. The media have obsessed about him and his relationship with Obama precisely because of the elephant-in-the-room question: Is Obama a real American? That's why the flag pin issue is a problem for him but not for McCain or Clinton. That's why his name is a problem. That's why even the elitist tag has become a problem--because the cosmopolitanism necessary for any president who truly embraces all Americans is associated with the tolerance and broadmindedness of the cosmopolitanism associated educated urban elites. That this is a negative is facetious. That Clinton has tried to exploit this by pandering to these country folks is laughable. It's hard for me to understand anybody who has been watching her in the last two months can take her seriously anymore.

But media narratives notwithstanding, these good country folk are no more real Americans than the urbanites who attend Trinity United. They each have their own perspective. They each have their own blind spots. But they are equally Americans. And if one or the other of them is angry or bitter or resentful or whatever, it's ok. If one group is suspicious of or fears the other, maybe there's good reason for it. That's the way we humans are and we simply have to accept that as the starting point. No one should sugarcoat the problem, and Obama's honest about that in his "More Perfect Union" speech was so refreshing because he didn't sugarcoat it.  It was like uncovering a festering wound to sun and fresh air in order that it might heal.

So when I hear Jeremiah Wright speak, it doesn't particularly upset me. Maybe because I agree with most of what he has to say about America's abuses of its governmental power. But that doesn't mean he's right or that I am. The point is that it's a perspective that has been suppressed from discussion in the mainstream, and it ought not to be. I have defended him here this past week in part because of my bias that whenever there is a media feeding frenzy like the one we've seen, it's all smoke and no fire. I have seen nothing to persuade me otherwise. Ninety percent of what we've seen about this man in the clips has been distorted by the way it feeds into white fears about the angry black man. He is angry, but he is so much more than that.  And I have defended him also because I believe that being able to hear  what Wright has to say is part of the airing out process. I agree with almost everything I have heard him say,

Is he wounded?  Yes.  Is he flawed?  Yes. But we all are. Would he have had more credibility if he didn't bring the HIV and Farrakhan business into the discussion?  Yes, but things are not neat, nor do they in real life follow ideal scripts. Has he hurt Obama?  I don't think as much as so many fear. And if he has mortally wounded Obama, that's a test America will have failed, not Wright or Obama.

I understand that Obama had to sever his connection to Wright, but I don't want him to go away. We can't heal if we can't hear what a man like Wright has to say. Things are not neat.  Reality doesn't follow anyone's ideal script, and it's just part of the test Obama has to pass if he's going to be the president for all Americans. For Jeremiah Wright is a real American--a better American than most of those in the media criticizing him.  He's someone who has had made a tremendous difference for the better in so many people's lives--including Obama's and his family's. And whether we agree with him or not, whether we feel comfortable with his communication style or not, he needs to be part of the conversation--not vilified the way he has been.

And so yes this whole Rev. Wright business has not made it easier for Obama, but that's the nature of the test. It has never been a question whether race would be an issue in this election.  It's been one at least since South Carolina when the Clinton campaign tried to brand Obama as the black candidate.

***

UPDATE: Moyers on the post-interview Wright:

Wright’s offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn’t fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone’s neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school.

What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettles some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship.

We’re often exposed to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I’ve never seen anything like this – this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner played out right in front of our eyes.

Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race.

It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said, “beware the terrible simplifiers.” Read more.

Vicious Truths

Commonweal Magazine has a short piece by Don Wycliff, a relatively mainstream writer (teaches media criticism at Notre Dame), who sees Wright's public comments as I do: 

Whatever may have been Wright’s motives for speaking out now, he stands to earn a dubious distinction in American history: the man who torpedoed the presidential chances of the first African American with a genuine chance of winning that office. That’s not exactly the sort of thing you want your grandchildren to have to hear every Black History Month.
 
But political impact aside, what was it about Wright’s National Press Club appearance that got everybody so upset? From the beginning of the Wright drama, when snippets of his sermons began showing up on TV, I have thought that, with the exception of the dark suspicion that the government ginned up the HIV virus to kill blacks, Wright’s principal problem was that he was speaking what an old boss of mine used to call “vicious truths”—things that are true but that the audience would rather not hear.  Read more.

Watch the Moyers interview again, and then watch his other speeches. This man is not crazy. He is not a buffoon. He might be outraged, but outrage, while impolitic, is sanity in our current situation. This brouhaha is all about miseducated (Wright's term) Americans' discomfort with the 'vicious truths' that black Americans have an historical perspective that enables them to see all too clearly. I think Obama sees these truths, but he can't speak about them because that would automatically disqualify him from public office. Obama is not a prophet; he's a politician, which means he has to work in the realm of the possible. And there are some things it is simply not possible for a politician to say.

If Obama really believes Wright's comments about Obama's speaking as a politician were meant to be a put down, I think he's wrong.  Wright was simply recognizing that politicians speak to a different constituency than ministers do. Obama has to worry about polls, and media, and voters; Jeremiah Wright has an obligation before God to speak as he best understands it the unvarnished truth. That's the prophetic calling. But Wright is realist enough to recognize that any politician who speaks the unvarnished 'vicious truth' does not get elected.

Obama's job is the much harder one; it takes more discipline.  He's continuously threading the needle. All the rest of us, including Wright, can speak freely without consequence. Obama, if he is to be effective, has to be selectively truthful because to speak some truths is to step on a landmine. There are some truths Obama simply cannot speak, but that doesn't mean that those who speak them are wrong; it's just that he cannot be associated with them and still be effective. That's the reality of the political calling.   

Wright a Resentful Egomaniac? 2

New Republic's Noam Scheiber quotes from David Mendell's Obama biography to explain why Obama joined Wright's church in the first place :

Wright earned bachelor's and master's degrees in sacred music from Howard University and initially pursued a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Divinity School before interrupting his studies to minister full-time. His intellectualism and black militancy put him at odds with some Baptist ministers around Chicago, with whom he often sparred publicly, and he finally accepted a position at Trinity. ...

Wright remains a maverick among Chicago's vast assortment of black preachers. He will question Scripture when he feels it forsakes common sense; he is an ardent foe of mandatory school prayer; and he is a staunch advocate for homosexual rights, which is almost unheard-of among African-American ministers. Gay and lesbian couples, with hands clasped, can be spotted in Trinity's pews each Sunday. Even if some blacks consider Wright's church serving only the bourgeois set, his ministry attracts a broad cross section of Chicago's black community. Obama first noticed the church because Wright had placed a "Free Africa" sign out front to protest continuing apartheid. The liberal, Columbia-educated Obama was attracted to Wright's cerebral and inclusive nature, as opposed to the more socially conservative and less educated ministers around Chicago. Wright developed into a counselor and mentor to Obama as Obama sought to understand the power of Christianity in the lives of black Americans, and as he grappled with the complex vagaries of Chicago's black political scene. "Trying to hold a conversation with a guy like Barack, and him trying to hold a conversation with some ministers, it's like you are dating someone and she wants to talk to you about Rosie and what she saw on Oprah, and that's it," Wright explained. "But here I was, able to stay with him lockstep as we moved from topic to topic. . . . He felt comfortable asking me questions that were postmodern, post-Enlightenment and that college-educated and graduate school-trained people wrestle with when it comes to the faith. We talked about race and politics. I was not threatened by those questions." ...

But more than that, Trinity's less doctrinal approach to the Bible intrigued and attracted Obama. "Faith to him is how he sees the human condition," Wright said. "Faith to him is not . . . litmus test, mouth-spouting, quoting Scripture. It's what you do with your life, how you live your life. That's far more important than beating someone over the head with Scripture that says women shouldn't wear pants or if you drink, you're going to hell. That's just not who Barack is."

Makes sense to me, and connects better with the Wright we all saw on the Moyer's show. Negative comments following Scheiber's post are the thing that drive me nuts about this whole episode. The key is to understand that the political is not the religious. They influence one another, but both are completely different forms of discourse. That seems to be a hard concept for so many people to grasp.

Wright a Resentful Egomaniac? (Updated)

Is this a style controversy or a substance controversy?  I see it as the first, but it's being played in the media as if it's the second.

I'm no expert in African-American Christianity, but I think that Wright is right when he says that this controversy is not primarily about Obama or him; it's about the Black Church.  Of course it's about Obama, but it wouldn't be a controversy if the style and tradition of Black preaching was not perceived so negatively by the media and white Americans who are uncomfortable with its emotional and often hyperbolic style.  Wright's sermons are being treated as if they were political speech, and they simply are not.  It's religious speech. It's a prophetic style of speech in a Black idiom. I think that is the point Wright is trying to make when he says that he must speak as a minister of the Church and Obama must speak as a politician.  I don't see that as a put down of Obama, but rather as simply an attempt to distinguish between the two types of speech.

So is Wright throwing Obama under the bus as Olbermann and his Obama-sympathetic crew seem to think?  Is Wright an egomaniac envious of Obama's prominence and is now seeking to push his way back into the limelight that Obama's campaign pushed him out of?  I don't see it--at least not in the clips being shown of his appearances in the last couple of days.

Is what Wright is saying the problem or that he has chosen not to crawl under a rock until after the election? What has he said that is so awful? I didn't hear it. If someone else did, tell me. So I could be wrong about all this, but I don't see it.

***

UPDATE: Apparently political realities are coercing Obama to disassociate himself from Wright. Here's what he said, if you haven't read it yet:

The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago. His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate, and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church.

They certainly don't portray accurately my values and beliefs. And if Reverend Wright thinks that that's political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn't know me very well. And based on his remarks yesterday, well, I might not know him as well as I thought, either.

I think it has more to do with whom Wright is playing to.  Dana Milbank sets the stage:

Speaking before an audience that included Marion Barry, Cornel West, Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party and Nation of Islam official Jamil Muhammad, Wright praised Louis Farrakhan, defended the view that Zionism is racism, accused the United States of terrorism, repeated his view that the government created the AIDS virus to cause the genocide of racial minorities, stood by other past remarks ("God damn America") and held himself out as a spokesman for the black church in America.

In front of 30 television cameras, Wright's audience cheered him on as the minister mocked the media and, at one point, did a little victory dance on the podium. It seemed as if Wright, jokingly offering himself as Obama's vice president, was actually trying to doom Obama; a member of the head table, American Urban Radio's April Ryan, confirmed that Wright's security was provided by bodyguards from Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.

Wright suggested that Obama was insincere in distancing himself from his pastor. "He didn't distance himself," Wright announced. "He had to distance himself, because he's a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American."

Explaining further, Wright said friends had written to him and said, "We both know that if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected." The minister continued: "Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls."

I would defend my earlier comments that this is more about style than substance.  But it's also clear that part of the substance of Wright's remarks is grounded in deeply felt anger. We can argue whether or not the anger is understandable or justified, but it's not arguable that Obama cannot allow himself to be associated with it.  It destroys the whole premise of his campaign.

 

Garry Wills on Lincoln, Obama, & Race

Jeremiah Wright was Obama's John Brown. Lincoln had to dissociate himself from the fiery and divisive Brown. He did so, and called attempts to link him with Brown "malicious slander." But some thought that he did not go far enough in denouncing Brown. Lincoln did not call him a fanatic or insult those who sympathized with him. He said Brown's attempt was "absurd" because it could not work. The reason he was so circumspect is not far to seek. Though he said no Republican was officially connected with Brown's raid, many Republican sympathizers favored Brown, including such respectable figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson. In fact, the particular hero of Lincoln's own law partner, William Herndon, was the Unitarian minister and reformer Theodore Parker, who secretly helped fund Brown. Lincoln had carefully avoided contact with Parker, an outspoken abolitionist. But he clearly knew and liked his work, especially his often used formula for democracy—government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Lincoln's political responsibility was not to inveigh against abolitionists, but to take the practical steps possible toward opposing slavery. In this situation, he pleaded with each side in the dispute to respect the good faith of the other side and work toward acts that would be both in accord with the Constitution (as it then existed) and respectful of the moral objections of those opposing slavery. As Lincoln would not denounce those sympathizing with Brown, Obama did not reject the black community that felt a sympathy (though not an agreement) with Reverend Wright. This was especially important to some blacks because Wright's main message was that blacks should achieve their own goals without begging for a handout from whites. Obama, who had seen the results of this message in his community organizing, rightly said that this is a particularly American approach:

It means taking full responsibility for our own lives—by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American—and, yes, conservative—notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright's sermons.

It is clear that Reverend Wright's church, which was fully supported by the United Church of Christ's white national leadership, was much more than the wild statements of its former pastor. Some suggested that any decent person would storm out of a church that had known such a pastor. But many decent persons, and not only blacks, had refused to do just that—and such people were also being denounced. Martin Marty, the respected church historian at the University of Chicago, had often attended Wright's services and found inspiration there. In some ways, Marty is to Jeremiah Wright what Emerson was to John Brown. Read more.

I hope I'm not proved to be a victim of my own wishful thinking on this, and I may very well be, but I think that Obama, like Lincoln, has qualities that will enable him to repel these kinds of small-minded attacks. No candidate is without vulnerabilities, but some are more easily branded by their vulnerabilities because there really isn't much about them to counterbalance those vulnerabilities. Kerry and Dukakis were decent people unfairly treated, but they didn't have enough personal soul power or whatever you want to call it to repel the slime that was slung at them, so it stuck.   It was true of the 2000 vintage Gore as well; he might be a different candidate today.  I'm not sure about that.  Bill Clinton is a complex, talented politician, but in the end there isn't really much more to him than his prodigious appetites.

Someting else drives Obama, and while he may only by the skin of his teeth win the election, I think he will in the end win in November, and if he gets eight years, he just might be the one to get us back to our better selves.

Jeremiah Wright on Moyers' Show

I don't know if it will make a difference, but Moyers' interview with Jeremiah Wright on his show Friday provided a refreshing alternative to the kind of treatment this decent and deeply Christian man has been getting and will continue to get at the hands of political hatchet men.  I hope it will be watched at least by most of the Democratic superdelegates. This is not a man to be feared; if we had a sane political culture, he would be embraced.  And to me it's not surprising that someone as sane a Obama would be drawn into the faith by such a man as Jeremiah Wright. This is one of those honest men who has made a significant difference.

I don't think watching the interview changed my opinion of Wright; it confirmed what I suspected was true of him. I didn't take offense at his remarks. His "goddamn America" was a condemnation of the government, not of the American people, and as the interview points out, Wright was pointing out that the behavior of the American government, like unjust governments throughout history, requires such condemnation. Anybody who questions that such condemnation is beyond the authority of the pulpit simply does not understand the three-thousand-year-old prophetic tradition. And if there ever was an American government worthy of such condemnation, it is this one.

That kind of prophetic style is something, quite frankly, we need more of from the nation's pulpits because Americans aren't going to find out about the truth from the mainstream media, which has its own vested interest in keeping Americans in state of denial and forgetfulness about its government's crimes. But nothing from the pulpit will be taken seriously by anyone unless it rings true, unless it has real moral authority. And that moral authority comes from those who have been willing to pay a price by the kinds of lives they have lived.

It comes from experience and a level of thoughtfulness about that experience. It doesn't come from inhabiting an ecclesiastical role or mouthing ecclesiastical talking points. It comes out of deep conviction intelligently expressed. Wright has lived that kind of thoughtful life, and he has earned the right to be heard and to be taken seriously. It's to Obama's credit that he has done so.

Pennsylvania (Updates 1-2)

This is getting to a point of pure facetiousness--looks like she's just going to make it into double digits. Now she'll get the money she needs to keep this going. It's as if the election gods really are playing a joke on us. And so it continues to go on and on and on. It's a great win for the forces that seek to keep us stuck in the mud. It's as if we simply don't have the collective will to break free.

Listen, it all boils down to something very simple. It's in part about race, but more fundamentally half the electorate  votes for the familiar and what seems safe and the other half votes for the future which for the first group is less comfortable because less sure. Pennsylvania has spoken about what it wants. It could have ended this drama by voting for Obama, but it  chose to prolong the agony. So be it. The rest of us have to endure the consequences.

UPDATE 2:  David Corn has it right:

During the Monica Lewinsky scandal--when many pundits and Clinton foes predicted Bill Clinton's demise--the Clintons learned a valuable lesson: sometimes you just have to put one foot in front of the other and keep moving ahead, paying no heed to those who say you have no choice but to quit. They had their party--most of it--behind them during those days. And now Hillary Clinton, with significant voter support, is plodding ahead, stuck with a strategy that at this point leaves her only the nuclear option of nullifying Obama's primary and caucus victories. But, she can reason, if I am not dead, then I'm still alive--and still have a chance. Politically speaking, she is somewhere between dead and alive. The undead? The next primaries may nudge her closer to one of those poles. And, once again, they may not be decisive. But as of now, amid the glow of her Pennsylvania victory, it's up to Hillary Clinton to decide at what point might rest the bitter end.

Can he superdelegates please put her out of her misery?  It would have been easier if her win were only 5-8 points.  Nevertheless. 

But the superdelegates are afraid that though they shoot her, they cannot kill her, so why risk facing the wrath of the undead which will be wreaked on them who did not stand by her.

UPDATE 2: From Sullivan.  It's all about brand loyalty:

This rings true to me:

Almost all working class folks have about the same knowledge of politics as you and I have about cars.  Which is to say, on one level, quite a lot, but it's not what they devote their lives to understanding.  So, as we do in the case of cars, they turn to other mechanisms, such as brand loyalty, to make their decisions.

What they know about Clinton is that she was a part of the Administration that spent eight years talking about issues that were important to them and presiding over an era of peace and prosperity. So what they are going on here is familiarity and positive experiences, the same thing that I do when I buy only Japanese cars.  This is a perfectly reasonable way of going about doing things even if I might make a mistake and select a very high quality Japanese car (Hillary in this analogy) instead of a surprisingly better this year in spite of lack of experience American car (Obama).  They are not are suckers who are fooled by Hillary's Crown Royal shot (perhaps if it had been JD) or whether Obama's "bitter" comment represents the totality of his views any more than I am a sucker who is fooled (or influenced at all) by television advertisements for cars.

I found out that a friend supported Clinton last night. I was stunned. I asked him why. He said he liked the 1990s, they were good times, he'd like them back. That was it. He had no real feelings about Obama, but he knew the Clinton name and associated it with good times. I pushed further. That was it. He's a man who isn't too interested in politics but knew enough to back the familiar. It may be that simple.

I think it is that simple. There are two corollaries: First, new loyalties can be formed. The Obama brand is one that I think will come to be accepted and valued. Second, Obama has this problem only in relation to Clinton. McCain may have been around for a long time, but he does not have the Clinton brand equity.

Tom Frank on Bittergate

Apparently Tom Frank is going to have a Wednesday column in the Wall Street Journal starting May 14.  I thought this piece in the WSJ was pretty interesting.  Closing paragraph:

If Barack Obama or anyone else really cares to know what I think, I will simplify it all down to this. The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they've got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup. I don't care whether they enjoy my books, or would rather have every scrap of paper bearing my writing loaded into a C-47 and dumped into Lake Michigan. If it will help restore the land of relative equality I was born in, I'll fly the plane myself.

So say we all.

Redbaiting's Return? (Updated)

Looks like it. Kristol and Lieberman want you to believe Obama's a Marxist, and Hillary's newest ploy is to argue that Obama will be crucified by the GOP in the general when it starts exploiting his association with 70s radicals Wm. Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

We knew this kind of thing was coming. We knew that the entrenched powers and interests will pull out all the stops to prevent someone coming into power who is serious about changing the rules by which the entrenched remain entrenched. And it should be clear that many, many Democrats are as complicit in that structure of power and privilege as the Republicans are.  And they dislike what Obama represents as much as the GOP does--and so Hillary is their girl.

Since the stakes are so very high, they will do whatever it takes to prevent Obama from being elected. And so now the strategy is simply to paint Obama as the candidate of the hard left. Hillary's strategy is transparent in this regard.  Her being behind this whole Ayers thing and her comments yesterday about MoveOn are designed to paint Obama as George McGovern deja vu. She wants the superdelegates to believe that she is the only choice if they don't want the disaster of 1972 again.   

I've resisted indulging in any anti-Hillary screeds here. I've said simply that I don't want her to be the Democratic nominee because she really is old school when we need new school.  I've said I don't like her militarism and don't trust her to effect the kinds of foreign policy changes that we need to recover from the Bush idiocies.  And I've said that I would vote for her if she were the candidate.  I'm not sure I could now. I've long thought of her and Bill as Republican Lite politicians, but she has come to embody everything that is most loathsome about Republican Heavy. 

I did not at first give any credence to the idea that she wanted McCain to win this year so she could run again in 2012, but I'm beginning to think there may be something to it.  She probably feels more comfortable with what McCain represents than with what Obama does. Neither she nor McCain really want the basic system of power and privilege to change. That system defines political reality as they understand it, and both understand that world, are comfortable with it, and have succeeded playing by its rules. They don't see that anything is fundamentally wrong, and think it's naive to think it could be changed, anyway.  Hillary and McCain are both anti-change candidates.

But I doubt that this redbaiting strategy is going to work well enough to turn things around for Clinton's candidacy.  And there's an advantage in this business about Ayers and Dohrn coming out now rather than in the Fall.  It gives the Obama campaign time to develop a defense and counterattack, and I think the Obama group gets it in a way the Kerry group didn't. This campaign will not allow Obama to be framed.

Rather than be afraid of the big, bad red-baiting Republicans we should remember that they have a profoundly flawed candidate, and I trust the Obama/Axelrod/Plouffe team to develop an effective strategy to insure McCain's defeat that will significantly contrast with Kerry's inept attempt to defeat the even more profoundly flawed Bush. And I trust a majority of Americans to be disgusted with this kind of thing. Nevertheless, the sooner Obama can be done with Clinton the better.  She needs to be sidelined as soon as possible.

***

UPDATE: To reinforce the point about Hillary's entrenchment as the anti-change candidate, I just saw this Michael Savage quote over at Sullivan's:

Hillary, I know what to expect from her, which is eight horrible years, but I'm not so sure she's still a Leninist. Her husband has made so much money in so many different capitalist ways that I actually think they've matured and become good Americans. [laughs] No, there's a paradoxical statement I've just made. In other words, I think the Clintons probably started out as far-leftist characters in their early years, but they've been around so long in the power structure and now, finally, they've been allowed to make so much money and they've circulated with the rich for so long that I think she's a safe bet. In fact, there's an argument to be made that she might be a safer bet than McCain in that regard.

Read the Media Matters piece on Savage which quotes him as saying that if Hillary wins the election,

"you're gonna get more of the lesbian-feminist propaganda thrown in your face than with [Sen. John] McCain, but other than that, it's gonna be almost the same exact -- the same exact administration."

It might be something of an exaggeration--McCain isn't likely to do much about healthcare, for instance--but given a little wiggle room for political hyperbole, it's probably more right than wrong.  Anyway Obama is the real threat, not Hillary--he's an Afro-Leninist.

The idea of Bill and Hillary being far leftists in their youth is laughable, but it's probably true that they were more idealistic than they are now. It wouldn't surprise me if Bill and Hillary look at Obama and see something of their lost past. But the difference between the idealism of Bill and Hillary then and the idealism of Obama now is that power always drove them--that's the one thing that hasn't changed.  I'm not saying that Obama isn't ambitious; it's just that something else drives that ambition, and it seems more resistant to the kind of corruption that has so obviously infected the two Clintons.

Obama is not pure. He has to play the game, and he will have to make compromises, and he will be soiled by it. But so far, at least, he hasn't become identified with the game. On the other hand the game defines Bill and Hillary--they have little identity outside of it. In the end the game might destroy Obama, but so he has resisted being absorbed into it or spat out by it.  He's in the game, but not of the game.

Quotes of the Day: Digby, Berube (Updated: & Marshall)

The important thing to realize is that these themes have been completely internalized by the villagers. They really don't even question it anymore, it's completely natural to them. When you see George Stephanopoulos essentially explain that Democratic voters are choosing between an flaccid, unpatriotic "metrosexual" and a lying, delusional succubus, and it's simply his job to help them sort that out, you know that he's completely lost touch with what people actually need politics and government for. Digby.

***

Things would actually be simpler if the American commentariat was composed merely of corporate shills. Instead, it's composed also of pathological, Chris Matthewsian misogynists, rabid foaming Glenn Becks, Tim Russert the Terrible Trivium, and, of course, David "Red Man Tobacco and Pabst Blue Ribbon" Brooks, who loved last night's debate and warns us today, no whining about the media.

Well, Blue Ribbon, ol' boy, this isn't a whine. Think of it instead as a barbaric yawp. When you write, "We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall," we know you're telling the truth, because you'll be around in the fall telling us precisely how important these things are. After all, as you note, we should "remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis."

Hold the phone, Red Man--did you say "expose Michael Dukakis"? As what, pray tell? As the flag-burning, hemp-wearing, Amerikkka-hating card-carrying member of the ACLU he really was? I seem to recall 1988 as the year George H. W. Bush was exposed as a craven slimeball who would use the phrase "card-carrying member of the ACLU" as an epithet. But then, I don't read the newspapers.

The point is that we are not dealing merely with a "corporate" media. That would be bad enough. We are dealing instead with a deeply decadent and deeply entrenched class of courtiers in the late stages of Bloated Beltway Media Empire, one of whose pastimes is chattering on about the folkways of the salt of the earth (bowling, shots-and-beer, guns, God). The level of chattering is directly proportional to the decadence of the commentator, which is why you hear so much about small-town values from people who last caught glimpses of my neighbors when they watched the opening thirty minutes of Deer Hunter in their suite at the Willard Hotel. The appropriate text for our situation is not so much Manufacturing Consent as the film Ridicule. Not a great movie, by any means, but a reasonable approximation of a situation in which we can find lunatics like Glenn Beck and congenital liars like William Kristol among our most powerful courtiers. Berube

***

...it occurred to me that we have now crossed an important threshold where the Republican operative cadre has sufficiently disciplined and trained the press (and more than a few Democrats) that their own role may simply be redundant.

Think about it. Organized campaigns of falsehoods, distortions and smears used to be something most people thought of as a bad thing, if not something that's ever been too far removed from American politics. Now, however, members of the prestige press appear to see it not as a matter of guilty slumming but rather a positive journalistic obligation to engage in their own organized campaign of falsehood, distortion and smear on the reasoning that it anticipates the eventual one to be mounted by Republicans. In other words, we've gotten past the debatable rationale that journalists have no choice but to cover smears and distortions once they're floated into the mainstream debate to thinking that journalists need to seek out and air smears and distortions on the grounds of electability, as though the mid-summer GOP Swiftboating was another de facto part of the election process like primaries, conventions and debates. Marshall

Pennsylvania Debate

Our liberal media at work.  What else is there to say?  Let's hope the voters in PA send a message next week that they are sick of this kind of petty nonsense.

UPDATE: And let's hope there are no more of these so-called debates. They serve no purpose except to expose the presumptive Dem candidate to cheap shots from these corporate media hacks.

What positive reason can there be to have another?  Obama can't cancel, but Dean should either work out new groundrules or just cancel any other debates that might be scheduled.

Obama's So-Called Gaffe III

Greenwald hits on the key to my vehement resistance to faulting Obama for his San Francisco comments: To accept the criticism of elitism accepts the premise that it should matter. This is a completely bogus narrative that the right has used to define Democratic candidates at least since the time of Dukakis. I have no illusions that it is a factor and that Obama made himself vulnerable, but it's the narrative that needs to be blamed, not Obama's relatively minor slip-up in word choice. This Democrats-as-elitists narrative must be rejected root and branch. No quarter should be given--not an inch:

So Barack Obama now takes his place on the ignoble path tread by every other Democratic candidate before him: as an effete, elitist, out-of-touch loser -- just like Mike Dukakis and John Kerry, and just like Al Gore and (when she was leading in the polls) Hillary Clinton. Conversely, the GOP leaders are stalwart and amiable though heroic Men of the People. . . .

By all rights, John McCain -- leading proponent of one of the most unpopular wars ever and tied at the hip to one of the most unpopular administrations in modern American history -- should be 20 points behind in the polls, at least. But he isn't. He is typically tied or even sometimes ahead. Why? Because the Cult of Personality constructed around him -- just as was true for George Bush -- remains largely unchallenged, while the right-wing/media monster demolishes the personality and character of the Democratic candidates. Until that changes, it doesn't matter how enthusiastically voters embrace the position papers of Democrats. The Right will continue to dominate our national elections irrespective of how vehement Americans reject their political positions and ideology, because these vapid themes predominate instead. Drudge Rules the Media World. Ignoring that reality or wishing it weren't so doesn't make it go away. . . .

Only in Media World could an individual who grew up in a poor and/or single-parent home with purely self-made accomplishments (Obama, John Edwards) be an out-of-touch "elitist" while individuals who live in extravagant wealth earned by others (George W. Bush, McCain) be Regular Folk in touch with heartland lifestyles and values. As Atrios noted today, even Howie Kurtz understands the bizarre spectacle of watching coddled media stars decree who is an "elitist" and who is in touch with Common Values:

It's mildly amusing to watch cable hosts with multimillion-dollar salaries wring their hands over how Obama can't possibly relate to the struggling masses. When was the last time most of these people had a shot and a beer in a bar, or visited a small town unless it was to make a highly paid speech? It's a small irony of this "out of touch" debate that upper-echelon journalists with wardrobe allowances or kids in fancy private schools get to pose as the folks who are in touch with the great American working class.

I am more optimistic than Greenwald that this kind of thing is less effective now than it has been in previous election cycles, and the early polling from PA and IN suggests that this ridiculously cynical play on Clinton's and McCain's part hasn't affected the majority Mainstreeters who have enough sense to see through it. We won't know until the votes come in, but I think that we might be so used to the demagogues getting their way on this that we underestimate the resiliency of a candidate who has real substance.

I don't think he's going to win in PA because the structural fundamentals don't favor him, but I don't think he'll do worse because of this episode. And in the general, we all have to do what we can to strenuously reject this absurd elitism argument.  It needs to be ridiculed and repudiated whenever it rears its ugly head.