Chait channels Obama

When I read Jonathan Chait's extended argument that a) many Republican policies have deep roots in slavery and racism, but b) for liberals to assume that advocacy of core conservative policies is itself a marker of racism is illegitimate, my immediate thought was that Chait was echoing Obama:

@xpostfactoid1  Apr 7@jonathanchait Hey, didn't Obama say that in March 2008? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/18/obama-race-speech-read-th_n_92077.html …

In a followup post, Chait himself notes that Obama had more recently stolen his fire -- in an interview with David Remnick published this past January:

“There is a historic connection between some of the arguments that we have politically and the history of race in our country, and sometimes it’s hard to disentangle those issues,” he went on. “You can be somebody who, for very legitimate reasons, worries about the power of the federal government — that it’s distant, that it’s bureaucratic, that it’s not accountable — and as a consequence you think that more power should reside in the hands of state governments. But what’s also true, obviously, is that philosophy is wrapped up in the history of states’ rights in the context of the civil-rights movement and the Civil War and Calhoun. There’s a pretty long history there. And so I think it’s important for progressives not to dismiss out of hand arguments against my Presidency or the Democratic Party or Bill Clinton or anybody just because there’s some overlap between those criticisms and the criticisms that traditionally were directed against those who were trying to bring about greater equality for African-Americans. The flip side is I think it’s important for conservatives to recognize and answer some of the problems that are posed by that history ...”

That is in fact a pretty exact match with Chait's thesis, as Chait asserts. But like almost everything Obama says -- in fact like almost everything most of us say -- it was close kin to prior pronouncements.  Here's what I had flashed back to, from Obama's great speech on race in the immediate wake of the Jeremiah Wright controversy. After recounting the roots of African American anger, Obama pivoted, in his on-the-one-hand-on-the-other manner:

Erasing the context of Fehrnstrom's gaffe

Blogging political scientists are useful killjoys, constantly reminding us that the things that feel like they matter most in daily political warfare usually matter not at all, or very little. Reagan's ability to sway public opinion from the bully pulpit? A mirage.  The 'driver's license' debate debacle that killed Hilliary's momentum? It didn't. The Etch-A-Sketch candidate, etched in stone? It'll shake clean by fall.

But this time I don't buy it. That is, I don't buy Brendan Nyhan's debunk in Columbia Journalism Review. Nyhan has two beefs about the coverage of Eric Fehrnstrom's Etch-A-Sketch gaffe: an ethical complaint about the way Fehrnstrom's remark has been interpreted, and a debunking of the widely forecast likely dramatic effects. On the latter front, I suspect he may be partly wrong. On the charge of unfairness to Fehrnstrom and Romney, I think he's almost completely off base.

The least expedient church to join....

One of the common right-wing smears attached to the Wright scandal is the assertion or insinuation that Obama joined Trinity United Church out of political expedience. A year ago, that possibility was debunked by Wright himself -- though its very preposterousness suggests other problems for Obama. Here, from a March 2007 interview (hat tip Andrew Sullivan), is Wright's take on that question:

I am not your typical garden-variety African-American clergy person, and because I'm not -- he was talking about organizing the churches in those early days. I said, man, you don't know who you're talking to. They don't like me. I'm not well liked in the city of Chicago, so you tell them you're a member of Trinity, you're going to turn off preachers before they ever get to know you, 'cause they're going to associate you with me, and just that association could be a negative in terms of how you are perceived in their eyes before you open your mouth -- "Oh, you go to Jeremiah's church." That kind of negative imaging I said might be harmful to him in terms of what he was trying to do in building coalitions and getting other churches to do things, again, for the benefit of the people. That would never happen just because they're going to associate your name with mine. That could be detrimental, I told him back then. It holds just as true, even more so, now. In fact, I just shared with, I was trying to remember who it is, somebody in public life was asking me about Barack, and I said listen, Barack might be forced by the media and/or by supporters to be very absent from this church and to put distance between our church and himself. As a politician, he might be forced into that. I have not talked to him about that at all. It's just that my read just of the blogs and what the right-Christian-wing leaders have said about him being a part of our church over past three months says this is -- you think it's ugly now, it's going to get worse, it's going to get much worse. For survival's sake, as a politician he just might have to not -- not that I love you less, I love me more. I'll never get elected as long as they keep harping on this. And that's -- again, I haven't talked to him about that at all.

To me, this passage does raise some questions about judgment, even as it puts to rest the question of expediency (other than the kind of 'expediency' that lets desire to believe and belong have its sway) . It also implicitly belies Wright's current claim that the attack on him is an attack on the black church as a whole. According to David Mendel's Obama biography, recently cited by Noam Scheiber, Obama was attracted to Wright and Trinity by the same qualities that reprelled many others: Wright's non-literal approach to Biblical interpretation, his opposition to school prayer and advocacy for gay rights, his "intellectualism and black militancy." Well, maybe - but what about that so called 'militancy'? -- were many in the black church community in Chicago repelled by the same crackpot and quasi-Nation-of-Islam ideology that has stunned the country as a whole twenty years later? Were many people -- with far less intellectual firepower than Obama (that's almost all of us) aware that Trinity's social activism was embedded in Wright's paranoid theoretical framework? Could Obama really not have been aware of the full crazy sweep of Wright's world view? Did he willfully blind himself because of the strength he drew from the man and the church community?

These questions do not shake my own support for Obama. I find him fully credible when he says that Wright's offensive beliefs "contradic[t] everything that I'm about and who I am." I can forgive him for turning a blind eye to someone whom he found compelling and attractive in powerful ways. But I do believe he did a number on himself by failing to see destructive elements of Wright's world view.

The ambiguous voice in the latter part of Wright's riff above could cause further problems for Obama:

For survival's sake, as a politician he just might have to not -- not that I love you less, I love me more. I'll never get elected as long as they keep harping on this. And that's -- again, I haven't talked to him about that at all.

This is spoken in the "first person speculative" -- Wright here imaginatively mimics Obama's internal voice. He seems to recognize this ventriloquism as a dangerous move, because he protests both before and after, "I haven't talked to him about that at all." But he seems to have settled Obama's thought process in his own mind. Alas, with what bitterness this preemptive interpretation spilled out fourteen months later!

Obama on Fox: "The right temperament"

Obama was on point, focused, calm and direct in his interview with Chris Wallace on Fox today (transcript here). He placed Hillary's four-for-six streak in the broad perspective of his steady march to the nomination. He took responsibility for any failure to win over any bloc of voters. He refused to suggest (or insinuate, as Hillary in a similar position might have done) that Bill Clinton was playing any race card.

While the interview began, like the infamous ABC debate, with a string of non-policy questions (electability, race and electability, connecting with working class voters, Wright, Ayers, ability to work with Republicans), the tone was different. Wallace pressed Obama, hard at times, but he pressed for more information - there were no 'gotcha' questions, or absurd phrasings like "Do you think that Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?"

The interview touched on taxes, Iraq, merit pay for teachers and partial birth abortion, but it wasn't really about policy. It was about who Obama was, whether the 'distractions' shed any light on that question, and whether he is electable. Perhaps Obama's central point came in the 'lightning round' at the end:

WALLACE: What mistakes have you made? What have you learned about running for president? What have you learned about yourself?

OBAMA: I’ve learned that I have what I believe is the right temperament for the presidency. Which is, I don’t get too high when I’m high and I don’t get too low when I’m low. And we’ve gone through all kinds of ups and downs.

People forget now that I had been written off last summer. People were writing many of the anguished articles that they’re not writing after our loss in Pennsylvania. On the other hand, after Iowa, when everybody was sure this was over, I think I was more measured and more cautious.

That I think is a temperamental strength.

I say that this point was central, though it came off the cuff at the end, because Obama was demonstrating this 'temperamental strength' throughout. He seemed to be viewing the long slog as if looking back twenty years later. As so often, he seemed like the sole adult on an electoral stage crowded with excitable children. This was true with regard to:

1. Bob Herbert:

WALLACE: Bob Herbert, columnist for the "New York Times", happens to be a black man, says that Hillary Clinton seems tougher than you do.

OBAMA: Well, look, after you lose then everybody writes these anguished columns about why did you lose? After Iowa, everybody said Obama is transforming folks because he’s bringing in all these voters we never expected would vote for a black guy. This is the nature of politics.
The fact of the matter is that we have done well among every group because people are less interested in dividing the country along racial lines or regional lines. They’re really focused on how we’re going to solve these big problems right now.

2. Bill Clinton:

WALLACE: Do you agree with him that there’s been a deliberate effort by the former president and some Clinton supporters to make race an issue in this Democratic race?

OBAMA: I don’t think there’s been a deliberate effort. You know, I take the president at his word that he is –

WALLACE: Which one?

OBAMA: Well, oftentimes, you know, I think that he’s been going after me hard. He may not have intended it in a racial way. I think he just sees me as competition against his wife. And that’s what, you know, husbands do, hopefully, or spouses do in political contests.

3. race:

WALLACE: Senator, for all your efforts to run a post-racial campaign, isn’t there still a racial divide in this country that is going to make it very hard for you to get elected president?

OBAMA: Well, Chris, if you look at the general election polls, we are doing better against John McCain than Senator Clinton is. And we are putting states in play like Colorado and Virginia that have not been in play for a very long time. Here in Indiana, we just — you just saw polling by "The Indianapolis Star" showing me beating John McCain.

And so, look, is race still a factor in our society? Yes. I don’t think anybody would deny that. Is that going to be the determining factor in a general election? No, because I’m absolutely confident that the American people, what they’re looking for is somebody who can solve their problems.
What they’re looking for is somebody who can pull the country together and push back some of the special interests that have come to dominate the agenda, who will tell them the truth about how we’re going to bring down gas prices, how we’re going to bring back jobs. And if I fit the bill, then they will vote for me.

If I lose, it won’t be because of race. It will be because, you know, I made mistakes on the campaign trail, I wasn’t communicating effectively my plans in terms of helping them in their everyday lives. But I don’t think that race is going to be a barrier in the general election.

4. losing:

WALLACE: If the voting ends in June and you are still leading in superdelegates - I’ll ask again. If the voting ends in June and you’re still leading in the popular votes and delegates and the superdelegates hand the nomination to Hillary Clinton, do you think the young people, the African American people, the young first time voters you brought into this campaign, aren’t they going to be awful angry?

OBAMA: I think there would be some frustration there. It’s not just young people, by the way. This event that we just had here in Marion, Indiana, I had a 48 year old white woman come up to me and say she is voting for the first time. Never voted before. She probably would not vote. It’s possible.

But here is my strong belief. Democrats are going to be unified. I think we should find that person who is going to be best able to not just defeat John McCain but also lead the country. I happen to think I’m that person. I will make that argument forcefully to the superdelegates prior to the convention.

These impressions are based on transcript only, so voice tone, body language, etc. are a blank slate. But on paper it looks like a highly effective revisiting of the toxic points of the ABC debate.

Related posts:
Obama endorses Hillary!
Changing 'the rules' on Clinton
Debunked! Obama spanks the Clinton Kids again
Truth and Transformation
Obama Praises Clinton, and Buries Him
Obama: Man, those Clinton Kids are Something

Who let the dogs out?

If Obama were a really good Machiavellian -- and maybe he is, it's no insult -- I might think he released the Wright video into the wild himself. It had to out sometime - Obama had warned Wright a year ago that he might have to distance himself at some point. When it hit, Hillary had been taking a beating for going negative on other fronts, so her response was late and muted. It also came after McCain had taken a bit of heat for seeking/embracing the Magee endorsement--and any case, with the Dem nomination still up for grabs, it would seem to make sense for McCain to let others do the dirty work. More broadly, as Huckabee pointed out, the storm broke in March not October -- too late to derail the nomination, too early to do maximum damage in the general. (Okay, maybe not too late to derail the nomination. But if it proved potent enough for that, it would be fatal in the general. So the timing was optimal.)

If the release was planned, we might further assume that Obama had his great speech on race already in his pocket. I personally doubt this. I'm sure Obama wasn't lying about two days of sequestration getting the speech in shape. But given Obama's documented awareness that he wasn't done dealing with Wright, I'd also be surprised if the outlines and much of the guts of that speech hadn't been brewing in him for some time.

Swiftboating Faith: WSJ's Riley smears Obama

A hit job on Obama by a Wall Street Journal opinion editor -- who cares? Well, this one, by WSJ deputy Taste editor and Fox News panelist Naomi Schaefer Riley, tests some lines of religious attack we're sure to hear a lot more of.

In her rush to belittle Barack Obama's integration of faith in his political persona, Rileydisplays a breathtaking --probably willful -- ignorance of Obama's religious practice, his stated beliefs about how faith should and should not inform politics, and of the multi-staged process of conversion he details -- without self-aggrandizement -- in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father.

Riley's premise is that Democrats can't do religion because they don't mean it. Her core charge is that Obama's membership in Wright's church was a matter of expedience:

As Mr. Obama recounts in his memoir, he went to meet Pastor Wright because he was advised that it would "help your [community organizing] if you had a church home. . . . It doesn't matter where really." So he became a member of the largest black church in the neighborhood, thereby furthering his activism and eventually getting the votes of Trinity's 8,000 congregants. Which is fine, but such an attachment is more utilitarian than religious, and sooner or later its true character will show.

"So he became a member..." What a wealth of Rovian distortion in that little conjunction of causation. Never mind that Obama chronicles the pressures, chronicles his doubts, chronicles much of Wright's doctrine and his and others' reaction, chronicles even how his own wariness of yielding to expedience delayed his commitment. Then, finally, chronicles a fully credible conversion experience that conjoins the content of the sermon that prompted it (in fact a beautiful, nonpolitical sermon of Wright's (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan) about the power of hope in people who had suffered greatly), the experience of the parishioners and the community in which Obama had immersed himself, and the associations aroused in his own mind. Obama quoted the conversion passage from Dreams in his speech on race, to extraordinary effect:

People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters....And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about...memories that all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild.

This from a young man who had chosen a line of work that engaged him day-by-day in the experience of the people of the South Side of Chicago. I do think that that Obama's desire to belong, and to be effective in his organizing work, played a part in this conversion, which was spurred by a willing imagination. Obama acknowledges as much in Dreams, which is pervaded by awareness of the complexity of motivation generally. What person who takes religious experience seriously would cast a motivational stone at Obama?

Second, Riley offers a ridiculous comparison with that man of the spirit, George W. Bush:

If you want to speak the language of religious people, substance matters more than style. Some religious leaders hoped early on that Sen. Obama's speeches would be peppered with the biblical language he had picked up in church, as President Bush's speeches have been. But there is no sign of that so far. Sen. Obama may have the smooth cadences of a black preacher, and his public appearances include a certain kind of call and response, but his biblical references are so commonplace that it's hard to call them biblical anymore. They tend to include the Golden Rule and regular admonitions to "be our brother's keeper."

This style-substance bifurcation omits an inconvenient truth: Obama, unlike Bush, has actually belonged to and attended a church for more than 20 years. In itself, I don't regard that as anything to boast about But when you're talking about "substance" of religious experience, it's germane.

Finally, there's the question of why Obama incorporates only the most "commonplace" Biblical references. It's deliberate-- a matter of the ground rules that Obama has set out for invoking 'religious' values in a political arena. According to Obama, it's fine to be inspired by the scriptures and tenets of a particular religion. But in politics, the values absorbed in this way must be translated into universal terms and argued on their intrinsic merits. Here's how Obama puts it in The Audacity of Hope (p. 219):

What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy does demand is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable to reason. If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons and seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or invoke God's will and expect that argument to carry the day. If I want others to listen to me, then I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

The 'universal' vocabulary of faith that Obama regards as valid in politics also describes the content of his beliefs. In Audacity, after chronicling his doubts, he has this to say about the content of his faith:

This is not to say that I'm unanchored in my faith. There are some things that I'm absolutely sure about -- the Golden Rule, the need to battle cruelty in all its forms, the value of love and charity, humility and grace.

Or, as Riley calls them, the 'commonplace' doctrines of the Golden Rule and being our brother's keeper. Dull stuff, that. Wouldn't want our politicians pushing such tired platitudes.

Leave it to Bush to inject the unctuous and intrusive preacher's vocabulary into his speeches. Obama aims to connect with Americans of all faiths and no faiths. Looks like he is succeeding.

Related Post:
Audacity of Obama: Embracing Wright and Grandma