The Inevitable Gaze Begins to Turn Toward Michelle Obama
It had to happen, and in fact has been happening below the radar. Here is what is now generating open discussion: is Michelle Obama the reason Barack Obama has inexplicably remained bound to Reverend Jeremiah Wright all these years?
Short answer: hell yes.
Today, Christopher Hitchens asks the obvious:
What can it be that has kept Obama in Wright's pews, and at Wright's mercy, for so long and at such a heavy cost to his aspirations? Even if he pulls off a mathematical nomination victory, he has completely lost the first, fine, careless rapture of a post-racial and post-resentment political movement and mired us again in all the old rubbish that predates Dr. King. What a sad thing to behold. And how come? I think we can exclude any covert sympathy on Obama's part for Wright's views or style—he has proved time and again that he is not like that, and even his own little nods to "Minister" Farrakhan can probably be excused as a silly form of Chicago South Side political etiquette. All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?
This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it. (One can picture Obama looking pained and sensitive and saying, "Keep my wife out of it," or words to that effect, as Clinton tried to do in 1992 when Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader quite correctly inquired about his spouse's influence.) If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company—and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable—then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.
He goes on to disparage her Master's thesis at Princeton, Stokeley Carmichael and Louis Farrakhan. None of this is surprising in the least. I long ago recognized Michelle would not wear well on the American public.
Barack Obama now has a double problem. The wife and the pastor. How can you hope to win the Presidency with that kind of problem?
His friends in our traditional media are desperately trying to protect him but it likely is not going to do any good. Indirectly, you can tell some folks are very worried and know his numbers may be cratering. How do I know this? Because a tried and true propaganda tool has been trotted out: the poll produced for the sole purpose of spin, spin, spin. Mickey Kaus has a good take on this phenomenon in Slate recently (scroll down to the Friday, May 2nd entry):
A staple of cocooning journalism is the quickie poll showing that "Voters Say They Aren't Troubled by X," with X being an issue the polltakers don't want voters to be troubled by. Typically, these stories 1) ignore the tendency of voters to lie to pollsters, especially when it comes to admitting they might be influenced by thoughts of the sort that they suspect polltakers don't approve of; and 2) even if everyone's telling the truth, if only 10% of voters say they will vote against a candidate because of X--while fully 90% of the voters say they are untroubled--that means the candidate has been badly damaged by X. In most races a candidate can't afford to lose 10% of the vote on a single issue. ... In today's story, of course, the [New York] Times strikes a blow for transparency and cost-efficiency, dispensing with the expensive, scientific-sounding claptrap of polling and cutting right to the soothing BS, interviewing a handful of upscale Indianapolis shoppers who duly deny they would be influenced by the Wright flap (but who knows what those "less cosmopolitan" Hoosiers down South will do)
Bingo. I love how so many articles are unthinkingly zeroing in on less-educated, blue collar whites not voting for Barack Obama and presuming the reasons are racial yet ignoring the fact that less-educated, blue collar African Americans are doing precisely that -- and so are other African Americans across the economic spectrum and there is no discussion those racial reasons. It feels weird bringing up this factoid that you know would likely be parroted by the White Citizens Council or the KKK but right is right.
I made a point to a friend last night regarding the sad truth that we, as African Americans, presume white people have so much work to do vis-a-vis race relations but the fact of the matter is that black people have just as much work to do, if not more.
Sen. Obama's dilemma reminds me of Max Plank's first attempt to look at atoms. He bombarded a sheet of gold leaf with radiation, and the reflected light on the other side gave him the answers and clues to what was in the gold.
Obama is the sheet of gold, Rev. Wright is the radiation, and Michelle is the reflected light.
Posted by: Roderick Reilly | May 06, 2008 at 12:28 PM
Why do all these black faces hate whitey?
Posted by: rex | May 08, 2008 at 03:13 AM