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.