jackconaty's Blog

On Fox Chicago Sunday, Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod gave us the politically correct answer.  The Reverend Jeremiah Wright is his own man and he speaks for himself....not the campaign.  Fair enough, but not far enough.  Wright was a part of the campaign on an advisory basis until he became the living embodiment of what many Americans have since learned is called a "sound bite" in the media.  The ten or twenty or thirty second video clips honed from Wright's sermons over the years at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago have been the way Wright has been defined to millions of voters...but now he's redefining himself.  Axelrod would not say this is a campaign tactic, but I will.  Let Wright explain Wright instead of Obama explaining Wright.

The Reverend Wright says attacks on him are really attacks on the black church in America.  He says the church has a long history of liberating the oppressed by feeding the hungry, treating the addicted and marching for civil rights.  He himself draws the line with Obama calling himself a pastor and Obama a politician.  Wright says he hopes the controversy surrounding him will have a positive outcome by sparking and honest dialogue about race in America.  Obama said at least that much himself in his speech on race in Philadelphia earlier this month.  But in the midst of the dialogue and the dialectic...what happens to Obama's post-racial identity politics campaign theme.  Can it survive?

That is the enormous gamble Obama's advisors are making with this string of public appearances by his former pastor.  Axelrod, one of the most brilliant political strategists in the country, lives by the axiom that "anger doesn't sell on the campaign trail."  The selling of Barack Obama depends in large part on the notion that America can leave the politics of confrontation and embrace the politics of conciliation.  That was the reason some African-American political leaders had a problem with his candidacy right from the start.   "There is no black America or white America" made for a wonderful speech in Boston four years ago, but to find the full text of that speech you still have to look under "dreams."  To millions of Americans, Obama's candidacy does represent an historic opportunity to get beyond the politics of racial division once and for all.  But his challenge now is selling that to the lower-middle class white voters who believe, fairly or unfairly, that they have been asked to pick up the largest tab on racial reparations in America. How well he can do that, or perhaps now, if he can do that, may well determine whether he is a Jack Kennedy or an Adlai Stevenson.  

Watch the complete David Axelrod interview here