Obama's Pastor Problem

Yesterday morning, as I turned on MSNBC at 9am to catch up on the weekend’s headlines and prepare for class, I was shocked to see Barack Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, holding some kind of press conference type event at the National Press Club, in Washington, DC. I have to admit, I changed channels about seven times until I realized that if I wanted to watch a news network I was going to have to watch him. (Regis and Kelly were discussing the Yankees, no thank you.) The duration of my viewing was approximately five minutes – that is all that I could take of him. Within the first minute, in describing a scholarly event regarding the black church in America, Wright made a joke that’s punch line was that the black church was an “unknown phenomenon”. This got a huge laugh from the crowd, but I did not find it very funny, and I believe that joke along with Wright’s other comments are detracting from the Obama campaign and have the potential to let the nomination fall through his hands.

After I had my five minutes with Rev. Wright, I went about my day. In watching the evening news last night, I was very interested to see what would be said about the morning’s press conference. NBC Nightly News had a clip of Obama stating that, “[Rev. Wright] does not speak for me; he does not speak for the campaign.” As we have discussed in class, and the media has discussed at length, Rev. Wright is a major problem for Obama and is only getting worse. In a New York Times article posted this morning, Alessandra Stanley went into great detail describing Wright as cocky, defiant, declamatory, inflammatory, and as she quotes Chuck Todd (NBC’s political director) in closing her article that Todd summed up Mr. Wright’s apologia by paraphrasing a Carly Simon song, “You’re so vain, I bet you think this campaign is about you.” (If you are interested in this subject, I strongly suggest you read the article by Stanley. It gives the NY Times a very conservative voice and includes the entirety of Rev. Wright’s statements on video: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/us/politics/29watc.html?em&ex=1209614400&en=e038a9e61ddb0909&ei=5087%0A.)

The question to ask now is how will Rev. Wright’s enduring 15-minutes of fame affect the Obama campaign? Right now, this issue is hurting him. As Tim Russert noted on the Today Show this morning, the North Carolina and Indiana primaries are next week and all discussion regarding Barack Obama is about Rev. Wright. Russert suggested that Obama needs to distance himself as much as possible from Wright, which he is doing, and some how turn the focus back to his campaign. In addition, Obama’s camp needs to hope that the media’s attention toward Wright will diminish. Wright is also hurting Obama when asked his opinion on Obama distancing himself. Obama’s credibility – that he is a new candidate, running a different, non-traditional, campaign – decreases when Wright states that he is a politician, and is responding in the typical style of a politician. Even though Rev. Wright is not an official surrogate of the Obama campaign (and I do not recall if he was ever described that way), however, his close connection to Obama and his remarks are leaving quite the impression with the media and the public regarding the Obama campaign.