Well it's day 53(?) of our continuing national soap opera involving our not-so-avuncular crazy uncle, Reverend Wright, and his young protegee, the once-fresh star Obama.
Like Miley Cyrus, Obama is beginning to show a bit too much skin. Cyrus was caught in a compromising pose for a 15-yr old, and Obama was caught in a compromising position with his pastor - at least for a young senator new to the national scene. It's dysfunction to the max in that Barack family lately: He threw his grandmother under the bus in order to protect his pastor but now his pastor is throwing him under the bus. Someone needs to have an intervention and ban bus drivers in the Democratic primary.All sorts of issues are brought to the fore. One is, determining how much should it matter if Obama's spiritual grandfather is Louis Farakhan. Rev. Wright calls Farakhan the "E.F. Hutton of the black community" - that is, when Farakhan speaks, people listen, implying if not a spiritual fatherhood between Wright and Farakhan then something close. And, of course, Obama calls Rev. Wright his spiritual father.
It's a sort of tug of war between ideas and people. People can hold spectacularly idiotic ideas but you can be great friends with them I've been told, although unlike my heroes Bill Buckley and Antonin Scalia (who vacations with liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg) I have little personal experience of it. So you want to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, thinking that he's got a pastor like Wright not because they see eye-to-eye but because he feels a kinship with him. On the other hand, if you're going to hang out with the cool crowd there are consequences when your buddies do something callow. Wright's little media tour shows that cool guys have a lot of trouble staying out of the limelight. Obama too can sometimes seem too slavishly a follower of fashion. If you're going to be cool and you're black-skinned, you go to the coolest church in town, the one that is edgy and very black. Because in a society that feels guilty about its past and wants to make up for it through multiculturalism, minorities are cool, and if you're a minority the more you stand out the better.
It's interesting to speculate how much Wright's theology plays into this. It's sort of chicken-or-the-egg: is Wright's blackcentric (i.e. self-centric) victimology theology make him more likely to selfishly hurt Obama's chances for president, or is it that Wright was attracted to bad theology years ago because it conformed to his existing character? We are all so resistant to good theology, which is why Chesterton said that it wasn't that Christianity had been tried and found wanting but that it had never been tried. It's probably unfair to compare, but you can't help but see the difference between Pope Benedict and Rev. Wright. Benedict points us constantly to Christ while Wright points us constantly to Wright.
If Obama wins the general, one would hope that he would be better at picking cabinent members than pastors, although admittedly he has a low bar to clear after GWB. (By the way, this tends to disprove that competition makes for better pastors. In Protestantism, you can choose your pastors and the fact that Wright has a big crowd behind him suggests the downside of that particular practice.)
And of course it's amazing how the Democratic party seems to always play to the level of its competition. This is a huge Democratic year. The Republican party is exhausted, running on fumes, and the Dems are choosing between a person whom something like 46% of the country has said they would never vote for (Hillary), and a guy with no experience who has ties to a white-hater. You can't make it up. To borrow from Casey Stengel, "can't anybody here play this game?"
Update: Well, well, the thing about writing about soap operas is that it's outdated almost as soon as you write it. It seems Obama has now thrown the pastor under the bus, although this time in self-defense. As Andrea Mitchell wondered, why did it take three days from the time Wright implied that Obama was just another politician doing his thing?
Meanwhile I stand corrected because a church-goer on MSNBC said the Trinity church that Rev. Wright used to preach at was not so much known for its crazy preacher as a happenin' place to meet and network. So although it was perceived as "cool" it wasn't due to the anti-Americanism.
Update 2: Mark Steyn also picked up on the soap opera nature of the whole thing, titling his Corner post: "As the World Turns":
When [Lisa] refers to "the racial drama with which our culture continues to live", to most Americans it's a "drama" in the sense that a daytime soap is: You're aware it's still out there somewhere, decade in, decade out, and you fully expect to be channel-surfing in 2023 and come across it for five minutes, but you don't want to have to live with it every day.
Imagine if Colin Powell, the genuinely post-racial man Obama merely claims to be, had run in 1996. Would the campaign have dwindled down to Aids conspiracy theories and the genetic predisposition of clapping rhythms? No. Because that's not where Colin Powell lives.
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