Burned Black
(posted by Jim Henley)
There’s a surface plausibility to the Jeremiah Wright conspiracy theory that Bob Murphy provisionally endorses. In fact, I heard an African-American caller to Air America this morning offer the same suggestion.
It might be true! But I think there’s an obvious answer to one point in the conspiracy-theory bill of particulars:
(And for what, exactly? What did Obama do to anger Wright, Hannity?)
I think it’s entirely possible that Wright felt condescended to by Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race, felt that Obama’s apologia for Wright’s views was patronizing and Obama’s disavowal of Wright’s statements constituted a betrayal. That to Wright’s ears, Obama’s "no more disavowing than" sounded like, "Shut up, old man. It’s my time now." Wright surely takes his own views as seriously as any of us do, and hearing this Jack and Jill talk from some ambitious kid whom he brought to the Lord could have really ticked Wright off. Could have sounded, as it were, "elitist." And, who knows what Obama surrogates might have been quietly telling Wright since the YouTube eruption, and how undiplomatic it might have been.
Put me on the ice floe, will you Junior?
Or, maybe Wright pulled his recent star turn purely to help his former parishioner out in the devious way Murphy et al suggest. I like that theory. My (white) Illinois sisters-in-law in the United Church of Christ, one a current minister, the other formerly one, spoke very highly of Wright to me at the end of March. They admired and respected his accomplishments a great deal, and their endorsement gives the guy a leg up with me. It would be fun to think of him as that wise and selfless. But it was always fun for me to hope that Deep Throat was really Pat Buchanan, and that didn’t pan out.
Meanwhile, I remain an Obama stooge, and much prefer him to either Clinton or McCain, but I suspect we’ve seen a foretelling of the tragic ending. Tragic endings are typical for Presidents. People elect GW Bush for his "just-folksiness," and it curdles into an anti-intellectual arrogance, leaving the man America wanted to have a beer with the most disliked bastard in the country - and, oh by the way, ruining the place. Bill Clinton’s fox-like intellect becomes a scatterbrained pursuit of micro-policies. (Of course, Clinton left office more popular than he entered.) GHW Bush sold America on a resume - the most prepared President in history - and lost office when Americans could no longer believe he had any sense of what their lives were like. Ronald Reagan started as the "big picture guy" and ended almost pitiably out of touch. (Of course, like Clinton, he also ended his Presidency beloved of most of the country.) What people saw as Carter’s rectitude they came to consider mere pietism. Nixon? They loved that gritty take-no-prisoners style, the one that betrayed him in the end.
I suspect that in eight years a lot of us are going to find Barack Obama deeply infuriating, and it will probably because we decide he’s a patronizing bastard. It won’t just be a perception thing either. It will get him in trouble. We made the job too big for anyone to do it well, and built it to bring out the worst in anyone who gets it. Power, you may have heard, corrupts.
Of course, I’ll hate Clinton or McCain a lot sooner and - hey! It already happened!
April 30th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
[...] don’t just blog about Jeremiah Wright at the Art of the Possible, I blog about the day’s favorite Jeremiah Wright conspiracy theory. I think we can all agree this makes me [...]
April 30th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
I suspect that in eight years a lot of us are going to find Barack Obama deeply infuriating, and it will probably because we decide he’s a patronizing bastard.
And, like you said above, Rev. Wright may already be feeling that way about Obama. “That kid thinks he can just talk down to me and sweep me under the rug? I’ll show him! I’ve got stuff to say and I’m going to say it whether it likes it or not!”
May 1st, 2008 at 6:30 am
Amen.
May 1st, 2008 at 7:14 am
Kinda OT, but your description of past presidents made me think of the 70s and 80s:
Carter catches all sorts of crap for dealing with the economic mess left by Nixon and Ford’s policies, and Reagan gets much of the credit for change in fortunes precipitated by Carter’s appointment of Volcker, Bush Sr. gets much of the blame for dealing with the economic results of Reagan’s reckless policies, and Clinton gets lots of credit for getting to play with all the breathing room Bush Sr. gave him. I would say that Bush gets blamed for the aftermath of the Clinton party, but Bush, Jr. has only added gas to the fire, so he deserves any blame he gets.
Not that any of them were truly capable of the tasks placed before them, but even when they were marginally effective, they usually get scorned for it.
May 1st, 2008 at 9:20 am
Q: You are singing directly to my Carter-revisionist heart, you know.
May 1st, 2008 at 11:21 am
Carter’s really an ambiguous figure. In a lot of ways, he–not Reagan–was the first president of the New Right. It was the Carter administration that first implemented many of the ideas of the Business Roundtable for disciplining labor and subsidizing accumulation. It was also under Carter that the second Cold War got well underway, the upsurge in military spending began, and Brzezinski’s shenanigans began the resurgence in American global activism after the post-Vietnam lull.
At the same time, though, Carter went into office mouthing a lot of the “new citizen movement” and “small is beautiful” ideas found in venues ranging from Harry Boyte to the People’s Bicentennial Commission, and appealing to populist sentiment against corporate privilege and large unaccountable organizations of all kinds. In a way, it was almost as great a turnaround as that between FDR’s traditional Jacksonian campaign rhetoric and his corporatist practice in office.
May 1st, 2008 at 3:10 pm
My theory about Wright is that he honestly thought he was successfully walking the tightrope of standing up for his beliefs without bringing down Obama, until of course the rope broke. I mean, think about how Wright and his friends at church probably talked about Obama’s patronizing dismissal of Wright’s opinions (what the high priest and priestesses of the Obama cult call his defense of Wright). He probably told his friends “Well, Barack is just doing what he has to do. He’s a politician and he’d be killed if he openly agreed with me.” And Wright’s family and friends probably nodded their heads and agreed that this is what is going on. So Wright thought he could defend himself and say in public what he undoubtedly thought was true regarding Obama and since he was being charitable in his own mind towards Obama, he thought that’s how it would sound.
As for Barack, he’s the least of three evils. A shameless liar and panderer, but I think that’s part of the constitutional requirements.