When I was in grade school, a man from Egypt visited our church
in Minneapolis. He got on stage in the parish hall and showed
slides and talked about his country. He had skin of that nut brown
shade common to the Mideast.
“That’s the color Jesus probably was,” my mother said to me.
Such innocence. Such common sense.
In his March 17 column on National Review Online, John
Derbyshire wrote that the recently publicized sermons of Rev.
Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of the church Barack Obama has attended
with his family for some 20 years “will kill Barack Obama’s
prospects of becoming our 44th President stone dead.”
Among many other things, Wright says that “the Romans were
Italians, so they were white, they were Europeans…and they ruled
over Jesus’s country. Jesus was black.” And, “This just came to me
in the last couple of weeks, y’all.”
The Rev.’s sermons, put out as an advertisement for the Trinity
United Church of Christ, a kind of “greatest hits” album, as it
were, have suddenly appeared in all kinds of news media.
Just the other morning, I saw the “No, no, not God bless
America, God damn America” clip on New England Cable News in the
waiting room of a dentist’s office. You can’t get any more down
market than NECN. If the Rev. Wright is there, he’s everywhere.
.
Importantly, Derbyshire did not say Obama would now lose a
general election. In fact, the Rev. Wright’s inflammatory
anti-American, anti-white sermons will persuade a marginal number
of important voters not to support Obama, and that will be
enough.
Who are these voters?
A COUPLE OF weeks back, when the whole superdelegate issue was
first being jousted about, we visited my favorite Republican, Wendy
Wakeman, and her husband Brad. Wendy served as our town’s chair of
its board of selectmen, and has worked as a Republican consultant
on campaigns.
We started talking almost right away about the Obama-Clinton
race. I said I thought it likely that Sen. Clinton would find a way
to manipulate the superdelegate vote in her favor, no matter what
the outcome of the primaries.
“See, what nobody says is, that’s what superdelegates are
for,” Wendy said.
American politics and government are chock-a-block with such
mechanisms, various slow-downs, take-a-second-looks. In Wendy’s
view, the superdelegates are supposed to vote for the party’s
mainstream, for its establishment. That prevents a party from being
run away with by a candidate of some momentary enthusiasm.
Like it or not, the Democratic Party has been under Clinton
control since 1992. And they have not shied away from using that
control.
ALL THIS PUTS Barack Obama sharply on the spot. Shelby Steele
described Obama as “a bargainer” — a black man who makes an
implicit bargain not to challenge white people.
Now, as a 20-year parishioner of Rev. Wright’s, Obama doesn’t
look like a bargainer any more. He looks like a dissembler.
Jeremiah Wright’s sermons rightly rouse suspicion, if not
hostility, in the very group of Democrats Obama must win first —
the superdelegates to the Democratic national convention.
The mechanism has always been in place to deny Obama the
nomination after a close finish in the primaries and the caucuses.
Now there’s a reason to do it.
Dark whispers warn of riots like 1968 in Chicago if such a pass
comes to be. But, if it does — here’s Obama, stuck again — it
simply proves what he’s trying so desperately to get away from:
That a lot of African-Americans apparently believe a whole lot of
pernicious nonsense. The worry is that Obama does, too.
IT’S GOING TO take all of Barack Obama’s fancy footwork — and fast
— to avoid defeat. Not in November, but in August. His speech
Tuesday was a pip. Charles Murray wrote that he found it “just
plain flat out brilliant — rhetorically, but also in capturing a
lot of nuance about race in America. It is so far above the
standard we’re used to from our pols.”
It comes back, however, to a very small group of voters, those
superdelegates. And to what the elite media does in the next four
months. This morning, for example, NPR’s hourly newscast did not
mention — did not mention! — that Obama would be making a major
speech on race, and on Wright’s statements.
Let’s see if the stonewall works. Among political insiders, I’m
betting it will not.
