Don't Blame Jeremiah Wright

The media is abuzz today over the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's appearance before the National Press Club yesterday. The consensus? That he torpedoed (or at least further damaged) Barack Obama's shot at the presidency. Stories like that are everywhere, and commentators from the left and the right find themselves in rare agreement. From left, we have Bob Herbert in the New York Times making these observations:

The Pastor Casts a Shadow
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For Senator Obama, the re-emergence of Rev. Wright has been devastating. The senator has been trying desperately to bolster his standing with skeptical and even hostile white working-class voters. When the story line of the campaign shifts almost entirely to the race-in-your-face antics of someone like Mr. Wright, Mr. Obama’s chances can only suffer.

Beyond that, the apparent helplessness of the Obama campaign in the face of the Wright onslaught contributes to the growing perception of the candidate as weak, as someone who is unwilling or unable to fight aggressively on his own behalf.

Hillary Clinton is taunting Mr. Obama about his unwillingness to participate in another debate. Rev. Wright is roaming the country with the press corps in tow, happily promoting the one issue Mr. Obama had tried to avoid: race.

Mr. Obama seems more and more like someone buffeted by events, rather than in charge of them. Very little has changed in the superdelegate count, but a number of those delegates have expressed concern in private over Mr. Obama’s inability to do better among white working-class voters and Catholics.

Rev. Wright is absolutely the wrong medicine for those concerns.

From the right, we have Jonah Goldberg making these observations in the LA Times:

Looking for Mr. Wright

The minister reveals that he's as radical and bigoted as his critics insist.

God bless the Rev. Jeremiah Wright!

After Barack Obama gave his big race speech in mid-March, many critics noted that the Illinois senator had thrown his own grandmother under the bus to defend his controversial pastor. Well, Wright proved over the last few days that he would not be outdone. He not only threw Obama under the bus, he chucked much of the liberal and mainstream media under there with him. If this keeps up, to paraphrase Roy Scheider in "Jaws," he's gonna need a bigger bus.
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Wright is every bit as radical as his detractors claimed and explodes Obama's messianic rhetoric about standing foursquare against divisiveness. Which is why that chorus you hear rising up from the John McCain and Clinton campaigns sounds an awful lot like this: "God damn Jeremiah Wright? No, no, no: God bless Jeremiah Wright!"

I don't know how much the Jeremiah Wright issue will hurt Obama's chances in the fall, but I think it is pretty clear by now that it will not help. Obama can't exactly "disown" his pastor because, well, he said he could no more disown Jeremiah Wright than he could his own grandmother. Besides, he stuck with the guy for 20 years. Disowning now would seem rather opportunistic. Still, I think it's what he has to do.

But my main point is that Jeremiah Wright deserves no blame whatsoever for the troubles he is causing. Barack Obama deserves the blame. This controversy is nothing more than a reflection of Barack Obama's political upbringing. He didn't choose his grandmother, but he did choose his path to political prominence. On the way up, his big tent covered the moderate left as well as the radical left. Or do you think there is some other reason why Code Pink, Moveon.org, Michael Moore and Hamas have all endorsed the man? The radical left knows a kindred spirit when it sees one. As such, I think it is fair to say that Jeremiah Wright is not causing problems for Barack Obama except insofar as he is helping to reveal who Barack Obama really is. No, Obama does not share the black liberation theology of his radical pastor, but Obama's views are close enough to that way of thinking that he does not find it to be abhorrent. If he did, he would not have stuck it out for 20 years.