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| April 28, 2008 10:30 PM
The Senator and the Disastrous Rev. Wright
The pastor comes to Washington — to blow up the Obama campaign.
By Byron York
Marion Barry is one politician who’s not going to distance himself from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “It was a brilliant speech,” the former mayor of Washington, D.C., told me after Wright’s appearance at the National Press Club Monday morning. “I’ve read his sermons, I’ve been to his church, so I know about him. It’s very clear most Americans only know Jeremiah Wright through those 15-second soundbites, which is ridiculous.”
Barry was echoing Wright’s own argument, often made by people who’ve been caught saying something inappropriate, that his words had been taken out of context. Monday, as Wright took the podium at the National Press Club, insiders on both sides of the presidential campaign were watching closely, waiting to learn more of that context; maybe Wright would explain himself in a way that could defuse the issue. “All those points that he had made that he had said were taken out of context, and here he had this opportunity to provide the additional context,” one GOP strategist told me. But it didn’t happen. “Instead of putting them into some context, he seemed to reinforce them,” the strategist said.
Wright’s performance not only left the Obama campaign scrambling to respond. It left some Democratic politicos, unattached to either the Obama or Clinton campaign, believing that Obama will have to abandon his vow, made last month in his Philadelphia speech on race, that “I can no more disown [Wright] than I can disown the black community.”
“I think he’s going to have to walk farther away from Wright, if he wants to win the general election,” one Democratic strategist told me Monday night. “He could say, ‘This is different now. Just to eliminate any questions, I am going to leave this church, because I believe the country is more important.’ It would say that Wright’s rhetoric has no place in his campaign or the lives of his children.” (As the Wright controversy has festered, observers on both sides of the political divide have wondered, usually in whispers, about Obama’s decision to take his young children to Wright’s church.)
So far, at least, Obama isn’t going there. “I just want to emphasize that this is my former pastor,” he told reporters in Wilmington, N.C. (The 66-year-old Wright is now a “senior pastor” at the church.) “Many of the statements that he has made both to trigger this initial controversy and that he’s made over the last several days are not statements that I’ve heard him make previously. They don’t represent my views and they don’t represent what this campaign is about.”
The Democratic strategist believes the Wright issue will continue to trouble Obama through November, provided he finally dispatches Hillary Clinton in the primaries. But on the other side, in the McCain campaign, there has been some turmoil over how to handle the Wright issue. A number of Republicans were dismayed when McCain condemned an ad made by North Carolina Republicans tying a local candidate to Obama and Wright. One southern GOP strategist told me he got a call over the weekend from another well-connected Republican insider who moaned, “What’s wrong with our guy? He’s turning into such a wuss.”
Many Republicans were relieved when McCain changed direction on Sunday, latching onto Obama’s comment that Wright was a legitimate topic of discussion and indicating that he won’t fight third-party attempts to use the Wright issue. “Don’t look for Sen. McCain to put it in his ads,” one source in the campaign told me. “Don’t look for him to make speeches about it. But the reality is, this is part of the fabric of the presidential campaign, and a lot of people have questions about it.”
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