The Wright thing - how much effect will it have on Obama 08?

Pretty much.

I think people should raise legitimate concerns about it. And the fact that he's retiring, and we've got a young pastor, Otis Moss, coming in, means that people should understand the context of this relationship. That this is an aging pastor who's about to retire and that I have made and will make some very clear statements about how profoundly I disagree with these statements. I don't think they are reflective of the church.

They're certainly not reflective of my views. I do think there is an overlap in the sense that there is a generational shift that is taking place and has constantly taken pace in our society. And Rev. Wright is somebody who came of age in the 60s. And so like a lot of African-American men of fierce intelligence coming up in the '60s he has a lot of the language and the memories and the baggage of those times. And I represent a different generation with just a different set of life experiences, and so see race relations in just a different set of terms than he does, as does Otis Moss, who is slightly younger than me. And so the question then for me becomes what's my relationship to that past?

You know, I can completely just disown it and say I don't understand it, but I do understand it. I understand the context with which he developed his views but also can still reject unequivocally. . .

It is about time for the press to take off the kid gloves and to treat him as they would any other candidate.

Ticomaya wrote:

Francis Schaeffer may have an axe to grind (and books to sell), but as far as I know no candidate in this upcoming presidential election has asked his father to advise his or her campaign.

So what?

Ticomaya wrote:

Quote:

Ticomaya wrote:

Where you attend church is none of my business, Joe.

May you be touched by His noodly appendage

The insincerity of your prior remark is duly noted.

Hunh?

Ticomaya wrote:

Do you believe McCain sought out Parsley as a spiritual guide, Joe? Calling someone "a spiritual guide" is certainly not the same as calling that person "my spiritual guide."

If McCain had praised Parsley for being "a spiritual guide, just not my spiritual guide," I might agree that there is a distinction there.

joefromchicago wrote:

Ticomaya wrote:

Francis Schaeffer may have an axe to grind (and books to sell), but as far as I know no candidate in this upcoming presidential election has asked his father to advise his or her campaign.

So what?

That was my same reaction to your post about Frank Schaeffer.

joefromchicago wrote:

Ticomaya wrote:

The insincerity of your prior remark is duly noted.

Hunh?

Regarding your statement concerning whom you would rather have in the pulpit ... you really don't care who's in the pulpit, right? Something tells me you won't be seated in any of the pews.

We may then agree to disagree on whether there is a valid distinction.

There is something in it.

The problem is that I just tried to write a summary and it was getting longer and longer and I was looking stuff up and it was getting more and more complicated...

It's not simple, and the simplest version is the worst.

The simplest version is "Obama's pastor is a paranoid, racist extremist who has been preaching venom for decades and Obama is pretending he didn't know even though he's been going to the church for 20 years."

I think there is a line between "controversial but plenty of good mixed in with the problematic" and "beyond the pale."

I think Obama encapsulated the more complicated version best with what he said to the Chi Trib editorial board on Friday, that FreeDuck cited earlier:

Quote:

I think people should raise legitimate concerns about it. And the fact that he's retiring, and we've got a young pastor, Otis Moss, coming in, means that people should understand the context of this relationship. That this is an aging pastor who's about to retire and that I have made and will make some very clear statements about how profoundly I disagree with these statements. I don't think they are reflective of the church.

They're certainly not reflective of my views. I do think there is an overlap in the sense that there is a generational shift that is taking place and has constantly taken pace in our society. And Rev. Wright is somebody who came of age in the 60s. And so like a lot of African-American men of fierce intelligence coming up in the '60s he has a lot of the language and the memories and the baggage of those times. And I represent a different generation with just a different set of life experiences, and so see race relations in just a different set of terms than he does, as does Otis Moss, who is slightly younger than me. And so the question then for me becomes what's my relationship to that past?

You know, I can completely just disown it and say I don't understand it, but I do understand it. I understand the context with which he developed his views but also can still reject unequivocally. . .

He's going to be giving a "major speech" on this subject tomorrow and I am optimistic about that. We'll see.

Sorry to be rude, but I am NOT asking for your opinion about Wright or the things he said. I am asking how big a deal this will be, in your opinion, for Obama's chances now and in the generals.

On a Sunday morning two weeks before he launches his presidential campaign, Obama is at Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side, gently swaying from side to side under a giant iron cross. From the outside, the church looks more like a fortress than a house of worship, with high whitewashed brick walls topped with security cameras. Inside, Trinity is the sort of African American community that the young Obama longed to connect with when he first came to Chicago. The church's motto is "unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian," and sunlight streams through stained glass windows depicting the life of a black Jesus. The Reverend Doctor Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Trinity's pastor since 1972, flies a red, black, and green flag near his altar and often preaches in a dashiki. He has spent decades writing about the African roots of Christianity, partly as a way to convince young blacks tempted by Islam that Christianity is not "a white man's religion."

On this particular Sunday, the sea of black worshippers is dotted with a few white folks up in the balcony, clutching copies of The Audacity of Hope they've brought for Obama's book-signing later. Obama, sitting in the third row with his wife and two daughters, Malia and Natasha, stands, claps, prays, and sways along with the rest of the congregation. During the sermon, he watches the preacher carefully and writes notes. When asked by Wright to say a few words, Obama grabs the microphone and stands. "I love you all," he says. "It's good to be back home." The 150-person choir breaks into a chorus of "Barack, Hallelujah! Barack, Hallelujah!"

This adulation is a far cry from how Obama was received by Wright when they first met in the mid-'80s, during Obama's initial round of one-on-ones. Like Smalls, Wright was unimpressed. "They were going to bring all different denominations together to have this grassroots movement," explained Wright, a white-haired man with a goatee and a booming voice. "I looked at him and I said, Do you know what Joseph's brother said when they saw him coming across the field?'" Obama said he didn't. "I said, Behold the dreamer! You're dreaming if you think you are going to do that.'"

From Wright and others, Obama learned that part of his problem as an organizer was that he was trying to build a confederation of churches but wasn't showing up in the pews on Sunday. When pastors asked him the inevitable questions about his own spiritual life, Obama would duck them uncomfortably. A Reverend Philips put the problem to him squarely when he learned that Obama didn't attend services. "It might help your mission if you had a church home," he told Obama. "It doesn't matter where, really. What you're asking from pastors requires us to set aside some of our more priestly concerns in favor of prophesy. That requires a good deal of faith on our part. It makes us want to know just where you're getting yours from."

After many lectures like this, Obama decided to take a second look at Wright's church. Older pastors warned him that Trinity was for "Buppies"--black urban professionals--and didn't have enough street cred. But Wright was a former Muslim and black nationalist who had studied at Howard and Chicago, and Trinity's guiding principles--what the church calls the "Black Value System"--included a "Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.'"

The crosscurrents appealed to Obama. He came to believe that the church could not only compensate for the limitations of Alinsky-style organizing but could help answer the nagging identity problem he had come to Chicago to solve. "It was a powerful program, this cultural community," he wrote, "one more pliant than simple nationalism, more sustaining than my own brand of organizing."

As a result, over the years, Wright became not only Obama's pastor, but his mentor. The title of Obama's recent book, The Audacity of Hope, is based on a sermon by Wright. (It's worth noting, however, that, while Obama's book is a coolheaded appeal for common ground in an age of political polarization, Wright's sermon, "The Audacity to Hope," is a fiery jeremiad about persevering in a world of nuclear arms and racial inequality.) Wright is one of the first people Obama thanked after his Senate victory in 2004, and he recently name-checked Wright in his speech to civil rights leaders in Selma, Alabama.

Blunt Sermons Rooted in Black Tradition

Wall Street Journal
March 17, 2008

CHICAGO -- Yesterday morning, 6,000 people streamed into Trinity United Church of Christ here for Palm Sunday services, where blunt, funny and often fiery sermons have made the church popular among African Americans and plunged it and Sen. Barack Obama into controversy in recent days.

The Rev. Otis Moss III, the church's new pastor, preached a sermon he called "Why the Black Church Won't Shut Up," describing how Jesus led the poor to Jerusalem, likening their plight to blacks in the Jim Crow South and slaves shipped from Africa.

"I'm sorry we're a noisy bunch," Mr. Moss told the crowd, many of whom stood and applauded. "But if I shut up, you won't know my story." Some in the pews shouted: "Say it like it is!"

Before the service, white-gloved ushers distributed a statement defending their longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. The statement said his "character is being assassinated in the public sphere because he has preached a social gospel on behalf of oppressed women, children and men in America and around the globe.…It is an indictment on Dr. Wright's ministerial legacy to present his global ministry within a 15- or 30-second sound bite."

While the sermons of Mr. Wright, Sen. Obama's blunt-speaking pastor, who is about to retire, may sound spiteful to some, they are rooted in the history of black protest and a Christian theology shared by some African-American churches.

For the past week, the presidential candidate, Mr. Wright and the church he led for 36 years have been criticized after media outlets aired clips from sermons showing Mr. Wright denouncing U.S. government foreign policy and the treatment of blacks.

With some voters accusing the pastor of practicing racism, Sen. Obama, a Trinity congregant for two decades, rebutted Mr. Wright's incendiary comments. "I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country," Sen. Obama said Friday.

Mr. Wright has said in interviews that his sermons are rooted in "black liberation theology," which he described as a sister of liberation theology, the lay Catholic movement that fueled political activism in Latin America in the 1960s.

The approach is more overtly political than that of most black Protestant churches, says Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University and a former member of the Trinity congregation.

Mr. Wright, she said, makes Biblical stories relevant by relating them to the frustrations of black Americans, such as subprime mortgages and the fallout from Hurricane Katrina.

By merging Bible stories with politics, some black preachers are trying to encourage their listeners to take action, as the prophets did. "The very language is speaking to the oppressed about overcoming their situations," the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a Chicago activist, said in an interview. "It's not calling for riots." Mr. Jackson doesn't attend Trinity.

The sermons and the church's array of activities and programs draw members who are public servants, University of Chicago professors and suburbanites. The church has been lauded for reaching out to gays and helping people with addictions and HIV/AIDS.

The Rev. Michael Pfleger, a white Catholic priest who serves a mostly black parish near Trinity, says outsiders may not understand the language, tone or metaphors that a pastor shares with his parishioners.

"America is our country and we love her, yet she has done such awful things," said Ms. Harris-Lacewell. "We have to have a place where we say…'This is not okay. I'm still hurt about this.' "

Since I am not running for office I can admit that I am, FOR THE MOST PART, in agreement with the "inflammatory" remarks of Rev. Jeriamiah Wright. We ARE reaping what we have sown. But that does not mean that Rev. Wright and I are anti-American; it means that we demand that OUR America be right, not EITHER right or wrong.
I don't know how Obama, Clinton or McCain think and feel. Being politicians they can't and won't say.
But I'm very glad I am not voting for Wright. As a moralist he is right; as a politician he would be dumb.

Obama: Damned if You Do....

It's not a new point to say that Obama probably felt both political and social pressure not to distance himself from Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church and the credibility within Chicago's black community it brought him, but this flashback from a Chicago Reader story from this very day in 2000 illustrates the point:

Obama's detractors rap him because he didn't grow up on the south side. He points out that he's spent most of his adult life there, his wife is from South Shore, and he's raising his daughter as a south-sider. His enemies also say he's too white and too bright. Part of it--although they won't say it publicly--is that he grew up with a white mother. Part of it is his demeanor. His lanky, Lincoln-esque body is usually stiff and upright, and he speaks in a stentorian baritone that sounds like a TV newscaster's (Lester Holt's, to be specific). But the main reason is that he's associated himself with Harvard and the University of Chicago, two strongholds of white power. "Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community," says Donne Trotter, who detests Obama. "You just have to look at his supporters. Who pushed him to get where he is so fast? It's these individuals in Hyde Park, who don't always have the best interests of the community in mind."... There are whispers that Obama is being funded by a "Hyde Park mafia," a cabal of University of Chicago types, and that there's an "Obama Project" masterminded by whites who want to push him up the political ladder. His campaign disclosure forms show that he's getting money from some of Chicago's most prominent white liberals[.]

I thought Obama's Philadelphia speech, broadcast this morning, was very well done (clever, graceful &logically satisfying) and intriguing. Intriguing because, though he has answered the questions arising from Rev. Wright's sermons, I am still left with some uncertainty about what he really is.

How sweeping and extensive are the 'changes' he would wish to bring to the country? Of what exactly would they consist? Is he asking for a more or less unrestricted mandate to bring the 'change' that is the persistent central focus of his rhetoric ? The continuing disparity between his intense arguments on behalf of our need for 'change' and the importance of our individual committments to it, and the details of what these changes may involve have become the mystery of Obama.

This disparity also adds to the frustrations brought to many arising from other issues such as those posed by Rev. Wright.