I must say this also occurred to me:
I watched some of Reverend Wright this morning at the National Press Club. It seems obvious to me that he’s doing everything he can to wipe out Obama’s candidacy, and I’ll tell you why I think it is. I think that people like Reverend Wright — and I think there are a lot of other race business hustlers out there, by the way, who think this — really upset that if a black candidate is elected president, that they’re going to be somehow diminished in their task, at keeping everybody in their flocks all revved up and angry about the ages old sin of slavery and the ongoing discrimination.
So it appears to me, if you look at Reverend Wright, listen to what he says and analyze it from the context or perspective of what’s best for him, which is clearly all he’s interested in, what’s best for him is that if Obama loses, because then it’s easy for him to say, "See, the white power structure doesn’t want a black man to rise to the pinnacle of power in the United States of America."
It would certainly fuel Reverend Wright’s future and continue to help him raise money and keep people whipped up into a frenzy. He’s not helpful. Whatever he thinks he’s doing, it is not helpful to Barack Obama.
Look: it’s clear that Obama has kept contact with the kind of politics that Wright represents; but it is also apparent to any fair observer that Obama himself represents a clear and powerful break with the culture and language of permanent black victimhood and identity politics. He is not Shelby Steele – but Shelby Steele could never get many black votes in contemporary America. Obama is a mixture in this, as in so many things, a complicated mixture. My view is it is that very mixture, that very embodiment of American complexity that makes Obama such a next-generation candidate.
It is no wonder the some of the old guard have mixed feelings about his ascendancy; or that Wright, at this point, might feel jealousy and the erosion of his worldview. And that’s why Obama needs to spell out again his own vision of a post-racial America that is not a non-racial America. Instead of seeking to play out the clock, he needs to seize the narrative again, before it irreparably seizes him.
The Dish 