Yes, I Think Less Of Him Now
I’m getting very tired of talking about the good Reverend Wright but nobody else seems able to drop the topic, so I don’t see why I should.
So: I was not at all impressed by Obama’s “divorce” of Wright. I found it entirely unpersuasive. I don’t think he should claim not to have known how radical Wright was, nor do I think he should have said that Wright had changed. He had one legitimate line to take: Wright has no right to say that he knows Obama doesn’t really mean it when he says he disagrees with him. Obama should have called him on that – and called him on it in extremely strong terms, telling him how offended he is that he (Wright) thinks he has privileged access to his (Obama’s) mind or heart. The secret things belong to the Lord, Reverend, not to you. And that’s it.
Obama’s new line – that Wright has changed, or that Obama had no idea he was this radical before – is unpersuasive on its face. And it leaves Obama no way to talk intelligently about his relationship with Wright, with Trinity, and with his own biography, which is at the core of his campaign. How should he have talked about these things? Well, on the assumption that this is an accurate summary of why Obama joined Trinity in the first place (and I’m inclined to believe it is), I don’t think it’s hard to see how he should have talked about it. But it’s too late now, I’m afraid.
I expected more of Obama, morally and strategically. This is not the end of Reverend Wright. He’s mad now. He’s going to try to get even. And I’m not sure Obama’s left himself anything to fall back on but hope.
I agree with that. It’s pretty disapointing to see a candidate that has, I think, genuinly tried to run a campaign as a honest adult take the politically expedient route. It just goes to show how you can paint yourself into a corner in politics if you are not really careful, or simply honest all the time. The question I have now is, could someone—a normal person—who was honest all the time be elected president, and if not, what the does that have to say about us as a nation?
He is still way more honest and adult than any other candidate I’v eseen in a long time (maybe ever) so I am still going to vote for him if he wins the nomination.
— cw · Apr 30, 11:13 PM · #
Noam Scheiber’s conclusion:
“Update: Just to clarify, by “felt most true to himself” I mean “most true to himself as a worshipper.” The point is that the pastor who made him feel most welcome as a worshipper probably also made him pretty uncomfortable politically.”
is implausible and likely backwards of the truth. It’s clear from Obama’s memoirs that he was attracted to Trinity because of its reputation among other ministers as being politically “radical.”
Read pp. 274-295 of Obama’s “Dreams from My Father,” which is mostly about Rev. Wright. You’ll see that Obama interrogated Wright to make sure that Trinity Church wasn’t too politically moderate and bourgeois for Obama’s tastes. Further, I really don’t see anything in Obama’s book that suggests that Obama has much of any kind of religious faith. Obama’s description of his emotional response to Wright’s “Audacity to Hope” sermon is largely one of racial solidarity, of feeling “black enough.”
Obama’s problem is that to be elected President, the person he needs to disown is not Rev. Wright, but his own younger self who picked Wright out of the dozens of black ministers he knew on the South Side.
— Steve Sailer · May 1, 03:13 AM · #
I think it’s a mistake to assume that Wright hasn’t changed, specifically in how he deals with Obama. There are many soft-spoken, intellectual, and kind radicals out there, and there are many preachers who simply become a different person when standing behind the pulpit. More than that, there are many mentors who feel a twinge (or more) of spite toward those proteges who end up surpassing them—especially when the protege doesn’t adhere to the dogma.
I think what Obama wanted to do, and thought he could do, was explain and to some extent legitimize Wright’s views without espousing them—to use Wright as one anchor of the long bridge he wanted to build between black and white culture. By attacking Obama personally and by reiterating and amplifying his most controversial views in a public spectacle, Wright made Obama’s plan for him impossible. In that sense, I think Wright really did change in Obama’s eyes from an explicable radical to an insane caricature.
That said, Sailer and Millman have a point that Obama still hasn’t explained his place in that church. I have to say I find their earnest Monday morning quarterbacking about as sincere as Obama’s claims not to know just how radical Rev. Wright happens to be. I’m sure you both perceive an element of excuse-seeking to this story. Its purpose is to provide voters who are so inclined with an excuse not to vote for a politician who is superficially appealing, and so the investigation cannot end until that excuse has been fully ventilated—until Obama is “exposed” as a closet radical or a liar. Since you believe he is those things, you should by all means continue. But I still hold out hope that he may pleasantly surprise the rest of us.
— southpaw · May 1, 03:58 AM · #
It’s hard for me to understand what else Obama could have said. He has to pretend he hadn’t heard Wright’s remarks and didn’t realize the extent of his views; admitting that he did know of them and continued as a parishioner for almost 20 years would imply Obama did not find the views objectionable.
The only way out of showing implicit support for Wright’s views is to (unconvincingly and disengenuously, but) emphatically insist that you neither knew about these views nor share them. Obama didn’t have a lot of options. Wright could not have done more damage to Obama if he tried (and perhaps he did).
— JohnB · May 1, 04:06 AM · #
How about this? He went to church not to affirm his pastor or his pastor’s politics but to find God.
— southpaw · May 1, 05:07 AM · #
I think it’s perfectly plausible that Obama knew Wright was radical but not that radical, or that radical about the specific issues in question, or that he would be the sort of person who would raise his most provacative views basically just to put on a show for white enemies of Obama.
— Consumatopia · May 1, 10:24 AM · #
“How about this? He went to church not to affirm his pastor or his pastor’s politics but to find God.”
Right, but the question Obama is trying to answer is, ‘why this church?’; ‘why this pastor’? There are a lot of churches in Chicago; Obama has to justify why he chose to go to a church where such radical views were expressed. It’s particularly challenging because it’s hard to distinguish the pastor’s political views from his pastoral message; the inflamatory quotes came out of ‘sermons’ after all.
As to Consum’s point, I have little doubt Obama did not think Wright was the type of person that would raise his most provocative views just to put on a show; otherwise the Philadelphia speech would have been written a lot differently. I’m not sure the ‘radical but not that radical’ approach would have helped either; it just raises the question of what parts of Rev. Wright’s (racially charged) worldview Obama does not find objectionable, which is the last question Obama wants to answer in any detail. Obama wants to be the uniter; Wright represents the antithesis of that approach – he thrives on stirring up grievances. Obama had to completely rather than partially repudiate Wright after this past weekend.
— JohnB · May 1, 06:49 PM · #
“Right, but the question Obama is trying to answer is, ‘why this church?’; ‘why this pastor’? There are a lot of churches in Chicago; Obama has to justify why he chose to go to a church where such radical views were expressed.”
I see your point, but I think the answer might be a lot more mundane than what Sailer and Millman after. People choose churches for lots of reasons other than the pastor’s ideology. Maybe Obama had friends who went to Trinity or maybe he put more stock in good works than sermons or maybe he found Wright intellectually challenging even though he didn’t always agree. Maybe Trinity was closer to where Obama lived or maybe the potential for his organizing work was greatest there. Who knows? Maybe Sailer’s reading of Obama’s book is correct and he was a godless radical. I didn’t get that impression when I read it. I got the sense that Obama probably does take a more intellectual and detached view of religion than Wright does, and that he joined Trinity because—after a young life full of disconnection and anomie—he craved a community above all else. He wanted a church in the full sense of sunday schools and barbeques and bible groups; he wanted to be a part of that community and was willing to compromise his intellectualism to join in.
In short, you can keep probing this, but ultimately I think you’ll just find a mundane and human compromise—like you do with most personal choices—not an archetypical political statement.
— southpaw · May 1, 11:10 PM · #
My hunch is that he chose Trinity precisely because it exemplified the sort of tendency he admired for its feistiness but was wanting to win over to a less adversarial way of thinking. There would have been less point in engaging with people who already thought the way he did. Is this really that hard to fathom? (So I’m more or less with southpaw here,
except maybe that the divergence with Obama’s own views was more of a feature, and less of a bug.)
“Yeah, there was this guy once… tried to expand people’s minds… they thought he was bad news… that he hung about with the wrong crowd… guy by the name of … [now I’m doing fingerguns] Jesus Christ…”
— Amit · May 2, 12:01 PM · #
Rather than make up a “hunch” about why Obama chose Wright, you should read what Obama wrote about why he chose Wright. It’s on pp. 274-295 of Obama’s autobiography.
Obama interrogated Wright to make sure that Trinity would fight the power:
“‘Some people say,’ I interrupted, ‘that the church is too upwardly mobile.’
“The reverend’s smile faded. ‘That’s a lot of bull,’ he said sharply…
“Still, I couldn’t help wondering … Would the interest in maintaining such unity [between the black classes] allow Reverend Wright to take a forceful stand on the latest proposals to reform public housing. And if men like Reverend Wright failed to take a stand, if churches like Trinity refused to engage with real power and risk genuine conflict, then what chance would there be of holding the larger community intact.”
— Steve Sailer · May 2, 01:28 PM · #
Hey thanks, people. Satisfying thread.
I want to note southpaw’s contributions as those with which I myself feel aligned.
Having only attended conversations and reporting and not read the book and thus with apologies to sailer, my understanding is that Obama chose Trinity not for the preaching (those unfamiliar with the ‘church experience’ imagine it as centered around the sermon: The sermon’s a feature, sure, but far from the central focus; the sermon plays a supporting role in leading the congregation’s gaze to to Christ. That is, worship) but for the church community and its expression of its nature as a ministry of embodied (incarnate) redemption towards the world around and beyond.
This is what as an activist he had hoped to find.
Of course he conferred with the pastor before he joined. That is, properly how things are done. The relationship established then was sufficiently resonant for them that Wright was later able to persuade Obama in all good conscience to accept the fullness of Christ’s redemption as his own.
Wright was instrumental but not central.
Wright was indeed central to the church’s success as a community of faith. As he said on Moyers, you have to fill the pews with people in order to extend its ministry to serve the world, and bring word of hope to its desperation.
But his sermons, as well, did not conspicuously feed divisiveness and hatred. Yes, he tore at the veils of complacency. But he also spoke compellingly of his and everyone’s attending to their truthfulness to and before God; the truth of their devotion and compassion and mercy and justice in utter honesty.
Also standing with Amil here, I think. And I think that southpaw’s construction follows from what I’m suggesting.
— felix culpa · May 2, 05:43 PM · #
True, I hadn’t bothered to get hold of the book. My conjecture was based entirely on my idea, derived from media reports, that Obama has always been against any sort of zero-sum stance and in favour of (for want of a better phrase) a sort of idealistic pragmatism – the ideal being reconciliation between previously antagonistic sectors of society.
Having now bought a copy of his book, I find the following:
___
‘Inside, Toure [formerly Stokely Carmichael] was proposing a program to establish economic ties between Africa and Harlem that would circumvent white capitalist imperialism. At the end of his remarks a thin woman with glasses asked if such a program was practical given the state of African economies and the immediate needs facing Black Americans. Toure cut her off in midsentence. “It’s only the brainwashing you’ve received that makes it impractical, sister,” he said. His eyes glowed inwards as he spoke, the eyes of a madman or a saint. The woman remained standing for some time while she was upbraided for her bourgeois attitudes. People began to file outside. Outside the two Marxists were now shouting at the top of their lungs. “Stalinist pig!” “Reformist bitch.”
It was like a bad dream.’
___
This is when Obama was twenty-two. He clearly finds Carmichael’s views wrong-headed. This seems to me to tell in favour of the idea that from way back Obama did not hold with any sort of radical anti-American world-picture.
In context, the quote offered by Steve Sailer shows, it seems to me, not that Obama wanted to stand up for Black interests against the American project as a whole, but to stand up for those interests as part of the American project. (MLK invited conflict of a sort, in his civil disobedience campaigns, as part of the fulfillment of the American dream, rather than its negation. And the conflict Obama envisaged was milder even than this, amounting merely to robust negotation.) This makes Obama a liberal, but does not make him at any time a closet anti-American, which is the charge that is really at issue.
(The worry about Trinity’s being ‘too upwardly mobile’ arose because it had been described to him as a ‘buppie’ church and he was concerned that it would not be inclusive of the poorer people he was working with, and not, it seems to me, due to hostility on Obama’s part towards mainstream society. The worry, that is, was that Trinity might be ‘too’ upwardly mobile, in the sense of being oriented exclusively towards the concerns of the well-off. So my hunch turns out to be false, at least as far as his initial motives were concerned, but mainly because he was at that time not aware of it as being a particularly radical place. The wider point remains, viz. that there are many good reasons why one might want to engage with people whom one is aware of as being more radical than oneself.)
— Amit · May 4, 09:08 AM · #