The Dish

A reader writes:

A response to your treatment of Dr. Paul and Senator Obama’s personal racial crises within their campaigns. Wouldn’t you agree that there are real similarities between the two issues within each campaign?

I take the point. No one argues that the ugliest views of Lew Rockwell or Jeremiah Wright are the views of Ron Paul or Barack Obama. Equally, the ugliness of some of Wright’s and Rockwell’s views does not exhaust the full views of either of them. Both Paul and Obama tolerated or over-looked some of the ugliness. The obvious difference is that Paul financially profited from those ugly newsletters; Obama attended a church that included some of those sentiments, but many, many others of greater breadth and depth. Should we give greater lee-way to black racism than to white racism? I don’t think so; but I do think it’s important to understand the cultural context of the black church and the preaching tradition which does occasionally veer into improvised popping off that might be viewed a little less seriously than a pre-meditated, printed pamphlet.

But while I do believe these are legitimate questions, I also believe that what the candidate says and believes and his own public record are far more important than the views of those with whom he associates. When you have a man like Obama who has a long, impassioned, searingly honest record on race and his long attempt to overcome it, it seems to me that that should be our primary focus. Ditto with Paul, whose courageous attempt to express classical conservatism in fiscal and foreign policy added a vital dimension to the debate in the GOP primary. My reader continues:

 

I happen to agree with your support for both Barack Obama and (your early support) for Ron Paul, and I hate to suggest the double standard garbage you’ve already dealt with, but there is possibly some room between your responses to both.

First, your responses to Dr. Paul’s ridiculous newsletters are distilled below:

In your first post on the subject, you noted that "[The Newsletters] are a repellent series of tracts, full of truly appalling bigotry… at best, Paul was negligent in having these things published under his name… there is a simple way to address this: Paul needs to say not only that he did not pen these excrescences, he needs to explain how his name was on them and disown them completely." 

And in a later post: "I should say I think less of Ron Paul after reading this article than I did before. Much less. I am not persuaded he is a bigot (like Jamie, apparently), and I remain impressed by the message and spirit of the campaign he has waged."

And per Senator Obama, the Wright Stuff:

It’s nutty, offensive and paranoid stuff. And it is perfectly legitimate for reporters and voters to ask questions. It is not much nuttier than Falwell and Robertson, however. And I don’t think it’s racist to understand that the black church has a different cultural style in its preaching and activism style that helps add some dimension to Wright’s record. If you read Obama’s books and listen to him speak about his church, it’s clear that he was not drawn by Wright’s more inflammatory and offensive language. His engagement with the Church was an attempt to connect with the life and feelings of a black urban class he had never truly belonged to and whom he intended to represent. We can forget what an outsider Obama was when he first came to Chicago.

Nonetheless, Obama needs to be much more forceful and candid in explaining his relationship with Wright. I’m a little leery of getting in between a man and his minister – it’s not unlike the lawyer-client relationship in some ways. And, goodness knows, I have had many a priest with whom I have disagreed or even found offensive. But like many people, I wouldn’t sit through one of these sermons, let alone come back for more. And it would be helpful, to say the very least, if Obama told us more candidly why he did and does.

Although there are moments of impressive consistency here, I can’t help but suggest that your response to Paul’s racism scandal was based on the Jeffersonian notion of "Principle, not men," and your willingness to accept Senator Obama’s relationship with his minister, no matter how alienating his commentary was, suggests that your allegiance to him is based far more on the man than his ideas.

Like I said, I happen to agree with you, but I thought that there was an illuminating value to your two responses to these issues.

I agree. I’ve spent longer watching and thinking about the life of Obama than of Paul; and I admire the content of his character in a way that I cannot say the same of Paul. Perhaps therein lies the slight difference. And perhaps too I have some deference to an experience of being black in America that I cannot share and have never experienced myself.

"I would much prefer to export homosexuals from the United States than to import them into the United States because we believe homosexuality is destructive to society," – Peter Sprigg, Family Research Council.

The FT reports that Apple is considering charging a premium for unlimited music downloads:

Apple is in discussions with the big music companies about a radical new business model that would give customers free access to its entire iTunes music library in exchange for paying a premium for its iPod and iPhone devices.

Tyler Cowen considers the implications:

…songs will get shorter and their best riffs will be held to higher standards of immediate accessibility.  If the marginal cost of a song is free, people will sample lots more and they will give fewer songs a second listen (higher opportunity cost); of course the opening bits of a song are already free in many cases but this will make sampling even easier.

Second, this will redistribute more of the market surplus away from song providers and toward hardware providers.  Say everyone bought the "all you can eat" version and Apple received zero revenue per song (there are few songs that will swing a decision to subscribe or not). TAddendumhat helps Apple in its bargains with individual song providers.  If you have a hit song, and Apple controls iTunes, there’s an element of bilateral monopoly.  So Apple is better off if it can precommit to not caring whether they have your song or not.  On the music company side, there would be a tendency toward consolidation, and bargaining over catalogs rather than songs, to offset Apple’s new bargaining advantage.

Virginia Postrel and Reason make the case for or allowing markets in kidneys. 

Bob Beckel on the Wright controversy:

Unless it is proven that Obama lied about not being in the pew when Wright delivered the controversial statements in question then, for the vast majority of Democrats at least, he is likely to put this crisis behind him.

But the Republican right wing has seized on the Wright story and is unlikely to let it go. For John McCain this has serious downside potential. Anger in the black community towards Republicans is established and immutable. But if conservatives are perceived as exploiting yet another race story, anger could spread to moderate Republican and Independent voters, many in the suburbs, where the Republicans have been bleeding support the last decade.

For those supporters of Hillary Clinton who see the story as a way of selling superdelegates on Obama’s unelectability, the downside is far more dangerous. If the Clinton campaign is caught using the race card, particularly after Bill Clinton’s ‘cracker tour’ of South Carolina, it will assure a Clinton defeat in November. Not only will blacks boycott the polls, so will many of the millions of young voters Obama has brought into the political process.

Bob is rightly impressed that Obama addressed both black and white resentment in his speech. Even Mickey can’t fault it as civics; he just thinks it’s a disaster for electoral politics. That distinction seems to me to be part of the problem.

From today’s NYT:

Mrs. Clinton’s advisers had hoped that the uproar over inflammatory remarks made by Mr. Obama’s longtime pastor that has rocked his campaign for a week might lead voters and superdelegates to question whether they really know enough about Mr. Obama to back him. Although it is still early to judge his success, the speech Mr. Obama delivered on race in Philadelphia to address the controversy was well received and praised even by some Clinton supporters.

Marc on where we are:

…the Obama campaign has met the challenge of Rev. Wright, perhaps sufficiently, perhaps not. But from the perspective of wavering superdelegates, it’s hard to find a level of panic among them. Obama has four weeks to recover until Pennsylvania; assuming that the bad news evens out the good news, the attitudes of these superdelegates will regress to the mean and they won’t be a position to rethink the entire premise of Obama’s candidacy.

…the analyst’s emotional brain feels momentum for Hillary; the analyst’s analytical brain can’t quite figure out how Obama loses.

(Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.)

Some see the enormous potential that Obama has to transform global politics:

"We Israelis traditionally look at the candidates of a US election through the very specific prism of "whether or not he or she would be good for Israel." Some of my friends were surprised that I was so enthusiastic about Obama: "Clinton would be much better for us," they claimed. But I believe that what is good for Israel is a US president who is good for the world. A US president with whom the Palestinian boys would identify would make Israel, and the whole world, more secure. It would inspire people everywhere to embrace what America represents – modernity, freedom, civil society, and democracy. I will be watching this election very closely because all six billion of us will be affected. And while I can’t vote for Obama myself, I will certainly pray that Americans will."

Sikasso, Mali, 2.15 pm.