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.