The New York Times got what it wanted when Barack Obama repudiated Jeremiah Wright. Previously I quoted George Will gloating in The Washington Post. But Not even Will can match the condescension with which the Times in last Tuesday’s edition gloats on its editorial page.

It took more time than it should have, but on Tuesday Barack Obama firmly rejected the racism and paranoia of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., and he made it clear that the preacher does not represent him, his politics or his campaign.

My own mixed reaction to this whole business has sent me looking around to clarify my views by reading those of others. What I’ve found is an almost universally negative reaction to Wright, coupled with sympathy or disapprobation for Obama depending on the bias of the writer. Martin Peretz, while he holds no brief for Wright, has some very laudatory things to say about Obama in a couple of posts at The New Republic. Here’s the first, in a post entitled “The Wrong Stuff.”

Frankly, I don’t think that Wright means doom at all for Obama. But the emeritus pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ was received on Sunday by 10,000 enthusiasts at an NAACP gathering in Detroit, reported in Monday’s New York Times. This event tells you how far we have yet to go in the coming together of the races in America, and it also is a demonstration of why we need Barack Obama so much.

As Peretz notes, Wright’s detractors might well pay attention to the fact that he is often greeted with enthusiasm by large audiences. But the heart of Peretz’s praise for Obama can be seen in another post very unfavorable to Wright and entitled “Barack Obama: Putting Race Hustlers Out of Work.”

Obama returned to the subject foisted upon him by Jeremiah Wright, and he tried once again to show that he did not choose to have American politics be assumed as a battle over enemy territory. There is some nobility in the effort, a nobility akin to Abraham Lincoln’s. It is a disposition that many Republicans used to honor and many Democrats, too: you may disagree, disagree over significant matters, but you try to found common ground. Obama is the last Democrat standing who still believes there is common ground, and I dream that when he and John McCain finally face each other without Hillary Clinton in the mix they will be speaking from different podiums but across common ground.

Peretz lumps Wright together with Cornell West, calling West a race hustler. Yet Peretz, himself, often presumes that American politics is “a battle over enemy territory.” A die-hard cold warrior, whose views about palestinians often border on racism, Peretz can find anti-Semitism under rocks it would never occur to me to inspect. Still, I think his admiration for Obama is sincere, and as an Obama supporter I’m grateful for it. I too still cherish the hope that Obama and McCain can face each other across common ground, and that’s why I understand how difficult Wright is for Obama.

But whatever difficulty Wright’s anger may pose for Obama agonistes, Wright is correct more often than he is wrong, in my view, as John Nichols pointed out a couple of days ago in The Nation. Wright deals in what Shelby Steele calls poetic truth when he talks about politics, and that makes his speeches easy to parody and to deconstruct as mere rants. This is what Obama did in repudiating Wright, but there is much in Wright’s message that all Americans ought to take seriously, albeit his language may be polarizing, and albeit he speaks from a racialist position that makes much of what he says uncomfortable to hear. Wright has been accused of egotism, but I think it shames Obama and those editorialists who have followed him to have dismissed Wright as a fraud and to have accused him of “giving comfort to those who prey on hate.” Indeed, as Nichols points out, Wright’s theme was reconciliation as he spoke before the National Press Club, and it was primarily in the question period that he occasionally went into attack mode as the questioners attempted to force him to give answers that could be sensationalized as anti-American.

Anti-Americanism is the bugbear of today’s revived McCarthyism. A google search turned up 948,000 hits for anti-Americanism. It has seemed to me, reading around, that those who deplore Jeremiah Wright from the political right focus on what they term anti-American in his language, while those on the left characterize Wright as racist and paranoid. I am wondering why Wright has become so important that he is singled out for particular vituperation from all sides. I’ve already quoted The New York Times. Martin Peretz calls Wright “a side-show, a freak side-show that is propped up by other black hustlers.” Richard Baehr fulminates against Wright’s “brand of crackpot racist anti-American lunacy,” as though it weren’t sufficient simply to call him anti-American.

Maybe Wright’s poetic truth is the real truth about America.

It isn’t Obama’s poetic truth. That’s about what America might be, can be, is on our best days. But what about the other days, like the gritty day lately when one of my neighbors whispered to my beloved that the new folks on the block are an interracial couple? And what about the gloating in the Times and elsewhere where writers and editors ought to know better? I think first, that Wright has received attention in proportion to Obama’s importance as a public figure and that the “matter of Wright” will be a measure of what our country has lost if it succeeds in taking Obama down. It has already diminished him. And I think, too, as I have said before, that the Jeremiah Wright spectacle is a drama of non-significance as it is being portrayed, that it displays the propensity of a sensationalist mediascape to focus on what it can hype, that it displays, as John Nichols says, “a contemporary political culture that has come to rely on character assassination as an easy tool for reversing electoral misfortune.”

We ought to be deeply ashamed as a people that we allow ourselves to be manipulated by political pornography. Barack Obama would have been right had he repudiated that, and my heart would be far less heavy today. But I have to say two more things about the Times editorial before I stop. This sentence, “In the last few days, in a series of shocking appearances, [Jeremiah Wright] embraced the Rev. Louis Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism,” is simply not true. It is unworthy of the Times to have printed such a lie. And finally these two passages, which taken together remind me of Leon Wieseltier when he called Andrew Sullivan “Obamaboy” in print on the last page of a recent New Republic and accused him of Jew baiting.

This could not be handled by a speech about the complexities of modern life. It required a powerful, unambiguous denunciation — and Mr. Obama gave it. […] This country needs a healthy and open discussion of race. Mr. Obama’s repudiation of Mr. Wright is part of that. His opponents also have a responsibility — to repudiate the race-baiting and make sure it stops.

Wieseltier had the decency to apologize for his remark (more or less). If the Times wants to help stop race baiting, it might start by cleaning up its own editorial page.

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.