May 1, 2008--May Day For Obama?

I've been agitating about what to think during the past few weeks as various forces have been mobilized to call Barack Obama's candidacy into question. The worst of my agitation was right after the debate between Clinton and Obama on ABC where fully the first half was devoted to burning issues that included why he does not wear a flag in his lapel. As Hillary Clinton, also sans flag pin, said after his less than stellar performance--"If you can't stand the heat you shouldn't be in the kitchen."

The moderators, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, though roundly criticized for pandering to the tabloid aspects of the contest, did manage to make Obama look bad. As reductionist as their questions were, he still should have had better answers at the ready and found ways to turn the skewering to his own advantage. That would have been impressive and would have scored points. But he made a mess of things by hemming and hawing and spinning and on occasion dissembling, which is a fancy way to say he did some lying. Not a pretty picture of the different kind of politician he had up to that point been largely successful in projecting.

Now he is confronted with the spectacle of Reverend Jeremiah Wright live on TV, 24/7. Forget for a moment how well or not so well Obama's response to this has thus far been, though I'll get to that. Before Wright launched his publicity tour, three weeks earlier after video clips of portions of some of his rants circulated, after tap dancing for a few days, Obama wrote and delivered a magnificent and challenging speech on race in America. Bigots aside, it looked as if he had transcended this crisis and had led the nation into a much-needed conversation about the legacy of our racialist past, what we have accomplished since the 1950s, and the work that still needs to be done that the very fact of his candidacy surfaced. Even the Pat Buchanans of the world had to begrudgingly acknowledge it was an historic speech and that Obama had put much of the controversy about his own relationship to the fiery preacher behind him.

Then earlier this week Obama and the rest of us woke up and right there on TV was Reverend Wright blanketing the networks. Not sound bites or carefully selected clips but full-bore Wright. We not only heard him embracing Louis Farrakhan, blaming the U.S. government for inflicting AIDS on Africans, and not retracting what he said after 9/11, but we also got a close up look as his smirking, disdainful, arrogant self. Never mind that the news media and he loved every minute of it and that Hillary Clinton and John McCain and Rush Limbaugh couldn't contain their glee--this was awful stuff and potentially devastating to Obama's candidacy.

Pretty much everyone agrees that on Monday afternoon Obama should have also been all over the networks to express the anger and sadness that he finally evinced on Wednesday. But when he did appear he did finally throw Wright under the bus, in the felicitous phrase of the chattering classes, and he did then disavow him as he said he could no more do than he could his own grandmother when she made racist comments.

While taking Wright to task three weeks ago Obama had tried to remain loyal to the man he credited as having been so important to him for so much of his adult life. Wright had brought him to Christianity, baptized his children, etc. But this week’s despicable stuff was just too much. In his own quietish way, Obama blew.

Even at my most cynical, thinking that Obama has been trying to finesse his relationship to Jeremiah Wright for at least 18 months (telling him to stay in the background as he launched his candidacy is to me most troublesome since to do this was to recognize how politically damaging Wright would be and Obama's behavior was thus based totally on a self-serving calculation), yet even at his worst Obama is still far-and-away the best person to nominate and vote for in November.

So now we know—to use Hillary Clinton’s metaphor—that Obama as well as Clinton and McCain comes with lots of “baggage.” Hillary claims hers has already been pored over but, as the Reverend Wright proves, Obama’s hasn’t. This will make him vulnerable to the Republican Attack Machine—though she and her husband have been doing a pretty good imitation of Karl Rove since she lost in Iowa—and thus we should choose her since she is best prepared to withstand viscous assaults and win the general election.

That may or may not be true; but we need to remind ourselves, since we are substantially ignoring Hillary Clinton right now that her baggage is so much more soiled than his or McCain's.

Shameless lying we know all about. Eager willingness to do anything to advance her own ambitions we are familiar with. But ironically, since race may turn out to doom Obama, it is the Clintons’ overtly racist campaign that to me most disqualifies her.

I’ve blogged about this frequently since the South Carolina primary when first Bill and then Hillary Clinton began to demonize Obama as nothing more than a Black Candidate and so won’t here go over that again. But in 2008, knowing this about Hillary Clinton, can we live with ourselves if we nominate and potentially elect someone as our president who is so casually comfortable playing the race card when the nature of this Democratic campaign has reminded us how much more work needs to be done before we can fully expiate our original national sin?