Well . . . my guy is in trouble, and maybe I have to own up to having been naive about Jeremiah Wright. It’s too bad, but I’m not alone. Both Eugene Robinson and Bob Herbert have disowned Wright in op-ed essays today, both of them (interestingly) making use of the ‘throwing somebody under a bus’ metaphor. Here’s Robinson.

It’s understandable, given how Wright has been treated, that he would want to attempt to set the record straight. No one would enjoy seeing his 36-year career reduced to a couple of radioactive sound bites. No preacher would want his entire philosophy to be assessed on the basis of a few rhetorical excesses committed in the heat of a passionate sermon. No former Marine would stomach having his love of country questioned by armchair patriots who have done far less to protect the United States from its enemies.

Given Wright’s long silence, I thought he had taken to heart Jesus’s admonition to turn the other cheek. Obviously, I was wrong.

I’m through with Wright not because he responded — in similar circumstances, I certainly couldn’t have kept silent — but because his response was so egocentric. We get it, Rev. Wright: You’re ready for your close-up. […] Historically and theologically, he was inflating his importance in a pride-goeth-before-the-fall kind of way. Politically, by surfacing now, he was throwing Barack Obama under the bus.

Like Robinson, Bob Herbert finds a good deal of ego in Pastor Wright’s current speaking tour and suggests that Wright is paying Obama back for speaking critically of him.

All but swooning over the wonderfulness of himself, the reverend acts like he is the first person to come up with the idea that blacks too often get the short end of the stick in America, that the malignant influences of slavery and the long dark night of racial discrimination are still being felt today, that in many ways this is a profoundly inequitable society.

This is hardly new ground. The question that cries out for an answer from Mr. Wright is why — if he is so passionately committed to liberating and empowering blacks — does he seem so insistent on wrecking the campaign of the only African-American ever to have had a legitimate shot at the presidency. […] My guess is that Mr. Wright felt he’d been thrown under a bus by an ungrateful congregant who had benefited mightily from his association with the church and who should have rallied to his former pastor’s defense. What we’re witnessing now is Rev. Wright’s “I’ll show you!” tour.

Consequently and predictably, George Will gloats in this morning’s Washington Post as he urges his media buddies and the pols to hound Obama about Wright.

When North Carolina Republicans recently ran an ad featuring Wright in full cry, McCain mounted his high horse, from which he rarely dismounts, and demanded that the ad be withdrawn. The North Carolinians properly refused. Wright is relevant.

He is a demagogue with whom Obama has had a voluntary 20-year relationship. It has involved, if not moral approval, certainly no serious disapproval. Wright also is an ongoing fountain of anti-American and, properly understood, anti-black rubbish. His speech yesterday demonstrated that he wants to be a central figure in this presidential campaign. He should be.

All this is distressing enough on its face, but George Will “in full cry” is almost too much to take. My disclaimer about Wright does not in any way endorse Will’s petty and self-righteous presumption to instruct the rest of us about what is “properly understood, anti-black rubbish.”

But Wright surely understands pushback. He has to be highly intelligent, and he couldn’t have had the career he has had without considerable savvy in regard to how race games are played in the political arena. I’m reminded, as I was in an earlier post about Wright, of Shelby Steele’s characterization of the good pastor.

Racism is this minister’s great strategic advantage; it gives him an almost demagogic power and a racial moral authority that distinguishes his church from his competitors. He offers his parishioners as much racial redemption as religious redemption . . . effectively, he defines the black identity as a faith in the pervasiveness of white racism.¹

Wright, himself, may believe in the pervasiveness of white racism. If so, he would not be alone in experiencing frustration at the persistence and stubbornness of institutional racism and white privilege. I have believed that his more strident language is to be understood as an attack on racism institutionalized. But I think Wright’s recent speeches have rendered such considerations moot.

So, what to do?

I think my guy has to take this on. Regardless of what anybody may have hoped, this presidential election is now as much about race as it is about anything else — whether events, or the media, or the Clintons, or Republicans, or Obama himself, or all of the foregoing are responsible. I’m inclined now to think that this doesn’t benefit the Clinton campaign, though I’m sure Clinton’s advisers are searching for a way to use it.

Try this thought. Barack Obama has been presented with a challenge to practice leadership, not as a candidate, but as the presumptive heir to executive leadership of this country, a position he could lose if he fails to rise to the demands of this moment. Call it a racialist moment, if you will. That doesn’t matter — he has to deal with it. God knows he’s got to be exhausted and perhaps angry and frustrated. But he has to put these things aside.

I don’t know what he has to say, but I know he has to make another speech. Oratory is his great strength. By this means he has almost begun a serious reformation of our politics, and it is the present means he has at his disposal. He shouldn’t debate another time; that will just give Clinton another opportunity to bait him.

Then again, maybe I do know a bit of what he has to say. Perthaps, as Shelby Steele puts it, Obama should let us know “who he is–what beliefs he would risk his life for.”²

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¹A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, (New York, 2008), p. 70.
²Ibid., p. 134.