Much in the way that my endorsement of Mitt Romney came the day before he dropped out of the race, my first and allegedly last post on Rev. Wright came within hours of Obama's big smackdown. My main consolation for such bad timing has been not having turned out rush copy like AP writer Mike Glover's:
"The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago," Obama said of the man who married him.
Obama the gay Muslim -- wait for it. Meanwhile, however, indulge me while I push my aristocratic class analysis of Obama even further than I dared in that Lone Wright Post.
Whereas the main conservative criticism of Obama now seems to be that he's reversed his position on Wright so quickly and completely that one or both of them must have been a giant pander, Michael Young at Hit & Run puts forward a more superficially devastating criticism:
Is it me, or did you also feel that Barack Obama's responses to the series of comments by Reverend Jeremiah Wright were overly focused on, well, how Wright had personally dissed Barack Obama and his campaign?
[...] for the candidate to repeatedly suggest that the problem with Wright is one of personal affront, of disrespect for Obama and his campaign, is to miss the point that voters will see things in a decidedly less self-centered light. For them, what Wright says reflects a worldview, a worldview Obama apparently managed to live with for some 20 years. They won't see the episode as just a thing between Obama and Wright.[...] His priority is clearly (and understandably) to save his campaign, but much less to determine what Wright's comments really tell us about the relationship between blacks and whites in America. But that's what many voters are interested in, because Obama's attitude on race relations will say a lot about whether he's presidential material. Instead, all they see today is someone nonplussed that Wright showed so little personal concern for him.
You can see how this attack presents the Giant Pander as simply one aspect of a more general and transcendent snobbery. (See also Phil Klein's take.)
I'd tell a different story about what happened. The main practical question facing Obama is whether his reaction, whatever its character, was enough to put the kibosh on Wright as a fixture of mainstream media attention. But the main theoretical question is whether his reaction had the right character. I think the answer is clearly yes. The reason why Wright's comments are so easy to reject is because they're almost completely irrelevant to race relations in America. True, ideology exercises a wildly disproportionate influence on American politics. But, just so, prying away its grip in this case simply involves dismissing those who agree with Wright as not worth taking seriously. Our discomfort with doing this, and doing it overtly, derives from our fear of seeming like snobs. Obama may have been reluctant, as I claimed, to condescend to go there; but go there he did.
And it seemed to me, at least, that he did so because he was personally angry at Wright, and that, in turn, because Wright made it personal. When Obama analogized Wright to his grandmother, he was being magnanimous. Exercising an aristocratic virtue like that is a recipe for being misunderstood in American politics. But magnanimity appears to be Obama's default mode -- he appears to actually be made uncomfortable by having to not be magnanimous. So you can hear that edge in his voice as he condemns Wright, as Young claims, less for Offending America (a silly charge that manages to be both incontestable and inconsequential) than for rejecting his gratuity -- that is, for offending aristocratic taste.
Whether or not one is a gentleman is made clear by one's particular human relationships, not by one's standing in the national rankings of public opinion. Wright is not only 'ungentlemanly' in terms of his political content -- the public, subsidiary consideration -- but in terms of his moral style, the personal
and primary consideration that Obama rightly emphasized. Obama had the luxury of allowing the Reverend the right to his political opinions, however outlandish or sour. What was inexcusable was the opinion of himself that Wright revealed. He failed to know his place, and Obama's one job was to put him in it. The trick involved putting Wright in his place with some explanation other than "crazy black man won't shut up about injustice -- we must silence the crank." Indeed, that never could be Obama's explanation, as he reiterated. Obama couldn't directly accomplish what America now can -- that is, wiping out pro forma democratic respect for crackpot bigots, right or left. But in order to get the ball rolling, Obama had to set the example by sticking to the personal.
Early in this campaign, I criticized Obama pretty relentlessly for trafficking in therapeutic politics. Strangely, as the season has drawn out and criticism of the man has mounted, I've found the Obama behind the bromides to be far more compelling and defensible, a remarkable portrait of how aristocratic virtues might thrive once again in the soil of the democratic soul. If only he were right on the issues...
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