John Baer: For Clinton, Wright's the gift that keeps on giving
HE IS RISEN. Just in time for another primary election day next week, we have the resurrection of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright.
HE IS RISEN.
Just in time for another primary election day next week, we have the resurrection of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright.
PBS interview with Bill Moyers over the weekend, sermon in Dallas yesterday morning, speech to the NAACP in Detroit last night and a scheduled gig at the National Press Club in Washington today, followed by Q&A.
Can you imagine the Q's?
Can you imagine the A's?
This on the heels of renewed attention due to the ever-so-enlightened North Carolina Republican Party using snippets of Wright rants in a TV ad that John McCain decries but pleads powerless to stop.
We are blessed with so many profiles in courage.
Now, we face a Wright rehash, which for Hillary Clinton is better than winning Pennsylvania or raising $10 million after doing so.
Wright, for her, is the gift that keeps on giving.
For Barack Obama, Wright is wrong.
Any refocus on Wright's comments that racist America infected blacks with AIDS, or deserved 9/11, or ought to be damned or called "the U.S. of KKK" helps Clinton by (further) damaging Obama.
It trumps Obama's Philly speech because America's attention span, discernment and appetite for substance are . . . Well, let's just say that there's a reason the nation's top-rated TV show since 2004 is "American Idol."
But what level of political naivete must Wright cling to if he believes that more publicity helps him or Obama?
And what sense of timing.
He resurfaces just as questions of Obama's ability to win white votes are pressed hardest in the wake of his winning just 37 percent of Pennsylvania's white vote last week.
And that, remember, was without Wright popping up, or politicians or stooge splinter groups pushing Wright as fodder.
Oh, wait. Speaking of stooges, there was former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos asking Obama during ABC's excuse for a debate: "Do you think Rev. Wright loves America as much as you do?"
Let me take that one.
No, George, I think someone who voluntarily left college to join the Marines, and later served as a Navy medical corpsman, hates America.
I also think that there's nothing more important to the American people and the future of the nation than what the Rev. Wright thinks or what he said in a church in Chicago years ago.
This stuff just makes me crazy.
As does Clinton's using Wright as a political bludgeon whenever needed.
At the Daily News, before admitting that she "misspoke" about Bosnian sniper fire, she declined comment on Wright stuff, calling it an issue for Obama to address.
But the next day in Pittsburgh, as the Bosnia thing was blowing up, she had plenty to say, including that she would have left Wright's church.
She called on Obama to denounce and reject the support of Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan (who has Wright links) before the Ohio primary, and brought up Farrakhan in the debate before the Pennsylvania primary.
This is waving flares at whites.
It's as unfair as suggesting that, since Ed Rendell joined with Farrakhan and praised the Nation of Islam as part of efforts to defuse racial tensions in Philly in 1997, Rendell somehow offended Israel or taints Clinton because of his support for her.
Political guilt by association, smear by isolated, out-of-context, out-of-proportion past events cheapens all who engage in it and damages democracy.
The danger is that it infects this election with the same sort of divisive distraction as Willie Horton 20 years ago - and that Wright is but the newest name in an old game of racial politics that no one wins.
Send e-mail to baerj@phillynews.com.
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