She only met him a short time earlier, there was a whirlwind romance, marriage appeared to be right around the corner, but then, suddenly, some startling information popped up and with it a question: Did she really, truly know this guy and still want to commit herself to him?
It strikes me that something at least roughly analogous to this scenario is playing itself out as previously wowed voters begin to learn more about Barrack Obama. Some must be wondering for perhaps the first time if this freshest face in the presidential race is the catch they had imagined.
We’ve known Hillary Clinton and John McCain for years now, and have known as well their slips, their slides, their flirtations with scandal. All of these have been rehearsed repeatedly, and have either done their damage or will likely never do it. It is only recently, however, that we have found out about Obama’s rabidly radical pastor.
The preacher, in certain endlessly televised sermons, comes across as a hate-mongering, anti-American, conspiracy-theorizing reverse racist. His imbecilities include the notion that AIDS is a governmental plot to kill blacks.
We meanwhile know that Obama was brought to the faith by him, was married to his wife by him, had his children baptized by him, named one of his books after one of his sermons and has been attending his church more or less regularly for two decades. So does this mean Obama condones this viciousness, is somehow part of it, is maybe a reverse racist himself?
The answersmight come more easily if Obama had been a well-known, closely examined, much-discussed public figure for years, but what we have to go on now —besides our intuition — is chiefly his campaign rhetoric and, specifically, the speech he gave on race Tuesday.
It was a remarkable performance in which the candidate put racial divisions in a large, historical context and spoke of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s loving work while also condemning angry words that, Obama said, went beyond what he had heard in sermons and derived from past experiences of discrimination. Particularly effective were Obama’s recollections of how his white grandmother had engaged in racial stereotypes. He did not therefore shove her aside.
This same speech included reasons to oppose Obama — his prattle about jobs being endangered by global trade that actually creates jobs and further indications of his welfare-state enthusiasms — but it was in fact a call for unity over what drives us apart.
He might want to repeat it several times to his wife, Michelle, who caught commentators’ attention with her talk in a New Yorker interview about an America that is mean, fearful, cynical, slothful and complacent. None of that makes her as outlandish as Wright, but the sentiments are at odds with her husband’s public message and another reason to wonder if we know less about him than we should.
In practical terms, the issue for Obama is whether the remarks by Wright might sufficiently slow down his momentum in the remaining primaries to give Democratic superdelegates a legitimate reason to deny him the party’s nomination.
While my guess is that he will yetget the nod at the convention this summer, a Rasmussen poll before the Tuesday speech does show recent slippage when you match Obama up again McCain; he had led by some not so long ago, but now is behind by a few points.
At least some voters may be thinking it’s time to back off from this courtship, and Obama had better hope there’s not more revelatory news of an off-putting kind.
