Monday, March 17, 2008 - Posts
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I am so ready to read the long magazine take-out story (Hanna?) about Obama and his church and its pastor: What Trinity United Church of Christ and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright mean to Chicago, what it means that Obama and his family joined this church and stayed there, etc. I feel like I'm missing the context that helps me make sense of the Kristol line Judith points to, and I don't really know how to fit Wright into my ever-developing picture of Obama. Agreed, everyone has their baggage. Also agreed that it's fair enough if Obama's membership in this church is in part a political calculation. I want to know the specifics behind this choice, though. I wonder, for example, if this church reflects the social world and family background of Michelle Obama as much or more than Barack's? Also, it seems to me that your relationship with the pastor who conducts your wedding ceremony and baptize your children says something different about you than your cozying-up political-pal relationships with whatever man of the cloth. Though, to be fair, I don't think Wright was making the statements Obama is calling "appalling and inflammatory" at the time of those Obama family milestones.
Melinda, you asked me last week if I felt more sympathetic to Spitzer because he's Jewish and so am I (and because I stated the obvious: He ain't gonna be the first Jewish president). Nope, I didn't feel more sympathetic, but I did cringe harder over his misdeeds. On that one, I felt like I did understand the context. I may well have been fooling myself, but the Spitzers feel to me recognizable—which made the whole thing all the more unsettlling.
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Melinda H. posts for me, except I'd take her argument a step further. It is actually a politician's job to have nutty acquaintances, because a politician needs to foster alliances with a wide range of different groups. That's how he or she acquires enough backing to get elected and, if elected, to get legislation passed. Any group passionate enough to have political significance is bound to have many nut jobs, or at least immoderate and fiery advocates, in its midst. That's why Bill Kristol's scornful observation in the New York Times this morning—"Obama seems to have seen, early in his career, the utility of joining a prominent church that would help him establish political roots in the community in which he lives"—warmed the cockles of my little Hillary-loving heart. Obama is a politician! He sees the necessity of seducing, pandering, backpedaling, compromising! He has done the work of establishing political roots in a community that he needs to win his campaign! Hurray! Now let's hope he does the same in many, many other communities as well. That way if I wind up voting for him, I won't worry I'm voting for a politics-transcending naif.
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The answer, my fellow Americans, is yes. Hillary Clinton, just for instance, has spent years cozying up to Nixon's old friend the Rev. Billy Graham. And yet what are the chances that she seconds Graham's feeling, caught on Nixon's tapes, that Jews are pornographers with a "stranglehold" on the American media? Just a ballpark guesstimate: zero. Or that John McCain is right there with his buddy televangelist John Hagee's belief that Catholics are the spawn of Satan? (I paraphrase, but what he actually said was worse.) Or that McCain agrees with his other "spiritual adviser'' Rod Parsley (his real name), who thinks we ought to declare war on "the false religion" of Islam? What, you didn't even know John McCain had a spiritual advisor? I doubt that he did, either.
Barack Obama, of course, has had a far more substantial relationship with his longtime preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who in turn is sweet on Louis Farrakhan. And as everyone with cable now knows, Wright has given a bunch of fiery sermons in which he blasted America's foreign policy and racism, and said Hillary Clinton has never been called the n-word. (Only, except for the part about the "chickens coming home to roost'' on 9/11, isn't much of what he was railing about sad but true? Former Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro suggests that Obama is an affirmative-action slacker with skills inferior to those of the average white guy, her candidate responds with a tepid tut-tut, and there's somebody out there who thinks racism is not still a problem?)
But spend two minutes listening to Obama, and you know he is no more in the same zip code with Wright on the anti-American or us-vs.-them stuff than Clinton is anti-Semitic or McCain is anti-Catholic and anti-Muslim. The real question about Obama in all of this is why, knowing that this guy Wright was a big political liability, he didn't quit that church years ago. But isn't the only possible answer that he didn't do that because he still has other-than-political motivations in his life, ties to a community that mean more to him than they maybe even ought to, and stubborn gratitude to the man who, as he put it, brought him to Jesus and to the "Gospel on which I base my life''?
Kind of puts to rest those rumors about him being a secret Muslim, doesn't it?
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