Does Obama Need To Come Out Hard Against Rev Wright?

My buddy and I went at it this morning. He wants Obama to come out hard - not to denounce Wright, or dissassociate himself from Wright, but to tell Wright publicly that he needs to "shut his mouth" for the good of the campaign.

I couldn't believe I was hearing this come out of my pal's mouth - he is an accomplished lawyer who has been the campaign manager for a couple of local judiciary elections himself.

"Dude," I said, "there is NO way he can say that."

"What do you mean he can't say that? If he can't show the American people that he can handle one loud mouth negro, then why should they believe that he can rule the country?"

"Come on, man," I said. "You cannot manhandle a negro like this. He doesn't have anything to lose. And he will use whatever you do against you, to show how he has defied yet another attempt by 'The Man' or his surrogates to silence someone who is speaking truth to power. That's the new black political phrase, you know - 'speak truth to power'."

We went back and forth awhile, until the need to get back to work intruded on our argument.

There is a reason Jackie Robinson integrated baseball, Sidney Poitier was Hollywood's first leading man, and Obama is likely to be the first black Democratic nominee for president, the same reason that Michael Jordan still gets more love from NBA fans than Shaq, Kobe, and Iverson combined, the same reason that Tiger Woods has the fans twenty deep around the greens.

My buddy wants Obama to show some teeth to Wright. I think its a waste of time, that the news cycles are so short now that this will die back down next week of its own accord, especially after the primary results come in and everyone has to re-handicap Hillary's odds of winning the nomination.

Now, if Obama had gotten to where he is today by being direct, by being forthright, by confronting issues head on, I might have had some kind of reason to agree with my buddy.

To ask a man to do something against his nature is the worst kind of political pandering, especially if its sole reason is to "look presidential". We haven't had a coalition building president in a long time. I am finding it refreshing that we have someone who does not have to resort to he-man antics to get his point across. The warrior king is a relic. Our presidents these days are exactly what the title says they are - chief executive officers.

If Jackie Robinson had thrown things back at the people who threw things at him from the bleachers, had hunted down those who made death threats against him, had taken his bat to the players who taunted him on the field with racial epithets, he wouldn't have lived as long as he did - hell, he wouldn't have played as long as he did.

If Michael Jordan had supported Jessie Jackson for president - publicly - if he had divorced his wife years ago and dated the kind of chicks he really wanted - a lot of the air would have been let out of His Airness's image.

Obama and his strategists have done pretty well so far. I think they can get things back on track and continue to execute their gameplan without overhauling the Obama personality at this late date.

The Chit Chat Hour

All the churches I've regularly attended have had black pastors. My mother's father was one of the founding members of the Methodist church her sisters still attend. It sits in the middle of nowhere, on land that was unsuitable for farming, next to the turn of the century school building where my grandmother taught.

I went there in the summers for Vacation Bible School. I've been there for regular services many, many Sundays. I've attended funerals there for three of my aunts and uncles.

The thing about the Methodist church that seems to keep a pretty good balance between the needs of the parishoners and the aspirations of the pastor is the rotation system the Methodists have that move the pastors around every few years. The church is associated more with its leading members than with its pastor, and they have been successful, at least so far, in putting the resources of the church more towards the needs of the members in their regular lives instead of larger buildings.

The sermons kept your attention sometimes and put you to sleep sometimes. The pastors tended to be educated, and most of them prepared actual texts for their sermons.

The church my father's parents attended was Baptist. It was at the county line, under a stand of huge oak trees, a wooden building with no air conditioning. The minister was old and wizened, with a smile that seemed pretty devilish for a man of the cloth. He farmed during the week and preached on Sunday. The thing I remember about him is the way he used the bible verses as a guide to a stream of consciousness chant, a sing song rythmn that he emphasized with a stomp of his shoe upon the wooden floor. It seemed to end up being the same chant week after week.

The churches I see here in Atlanta probably aren't that different from Rev Wright's old church in Chicago, except here they preach black prosperity. After a church gets a few hundred members, the pastor becomes a manager. After a church gets a couple thousand members, the pastor becomes an administrator. More than five thousand members and the minister is an executive, leading an enterprise with cashflows and payrolls more reminscent of a mid-sized business.

Leaving all that power and adulation has to be hard.

What I can't understand is how such an educated man, who has dedicated his life to uplifting black people, can put himself in front of the press and the TV cameras at this moment, knowing full well what his continued presence on TV sets around the country can do to thwart one of the most uplifting experiences in black American history to date.

There are more than a few black people in America, college educated people who have never owned a gun or struck anyone in anger, who would be willing to draw a bead on Rev Wright today.

The old adage "black people are like crabs in a barrel" stayed with me all through the night.

Even now, a day later, I feel like I'm in a movie. Of all the things that could happen, this is the LAST thing I would have thought anyone with half a brain would do, let alone a learned and accomplished man who has risen above some of the same challenges Obama is facing.

Everyone else has stepped back except Rev. Wright and Al Sharpton. Wright knows that there has been a noticeable absence of rabble rousing by the usual rabble rousers the last few months. More importantly, he knows WHY this is so.

The chit chat hour has begun in my office - Rev Wright's antics are being debated by a couple of people about ten feet away - they are incredulous, even though they understand that much of this grandstanding is calculated.

I'm not in a civil enough mood to join the conversation right now.

The irony is, I've posted statements similar to the some of the ones Rev Wright has made on this very website.

What I am afraid of is the public at large. I can't get to the place yet where I can trust that enough of the voting public is able to successfully parse fact from fiction in a way that does not obscure the good things about the Obama campaign.

I'd like to believe that I am smart enough, am sophisticated enough, to not need to have a hero, but I succumb once in while to the rapture of what could be, to the shining light of possibilty.

The machinations required to sustain the candidacy of this black man running for president of the United States has caused me to be more introspective than I have at any time since I was a teenager. Am I able to be more than I am? Am I doing what it takes to be more than I am? Are my life goals perched high enough? Have I done anything that was really worthwhile in these forty one years I've been alive?

I can understand the need to confront the ugly truths that are an important part of America's history. But to me, some of the same people who are putting $10 and $20 a week into the Trinity collection baskets on Sundays are some of the same people who are finding ways to send Obama $5, $10 or $15 when they have it.

To risk squandering the hope of those hundreds of thousands of people all over this country who have never given to a political campaign before is mind boggling to me.

In a couple of days this will pass. I'll revert to the things I know to be true. There will be no real surprises in the upcoming primaries. But until then I will shake my head in wonder every few minutes as I try to see the utility value in Rev Wright's recent actions.

Math Any Ten Year Old Can Do

I was just on the phone this morning with a friend here in Atlanta. I’d called her to inform her about the recent death of a young man we both knew, because we hail from the same town in South Carolina. It turns out she happened to be home this weekend, and had just found out herself. She was actually in the process of getting ready to go to the funeral when I called.

“Yep,” she exclaimed, “I know it’s got to be hard on his daddy. I guess I need to go sit in the church today. For his father.”

We traded a few remarks about the dead son. We spoke about the funeral, and where it would be held.

“You know the pastor can’t let you leave a funeral without making sure he’s taken you there,” my friend said. “He’s going to preach to us until he thinks we’ve got the spirit.” In the next breath, she brought up the controversy with Reverend Wright, Barack Obama’s pastor. “Speaking of pastors – how long you think they’re going to keep our boy on the ropes with this thing?”

I proceeded to talk about what the lack of diversity in the places that matter in America really means – that the overly homogeneous press corps we want to rely on as a Fourth Estate who represent ALL of our interests seem to only attend white churches. If there were more than a token amount of minority journalists and news reporters in this group, I asserted, maybe we would see some stories about kinds of churches she and I grew up around, where preachers understood that their job was to entertain as well as enlighten in order to maintain and grow their congregations.

She asked me if I thought it was a death knell for Obama – if the loss he was anticipating in Pennsylvania would put Clinton back in the lead.

“BACK in the lead? Lead of what?” I practically shouted into the phone. I proceeded to tick off the facts – “math any ten year old could do” is actually how I put it – that strongly suggested that this race would end up after the North Carolina primary the same way it did after the Texas/Ohio contests – with no net change to either candidate of delegates won, and no net change in the number of actual votes – now standing at 700,000 – by which Obama was leading Clinton.

“You need to turn that news off,” I continued, “and just use the links I send you to keep an eye on the raw numbers. If you listen to these people in the media, they will have you believing that 9 is greater than 10. That 1246 is greater than 1414. That 12.5 million is greater than 13.2 million.”

She laughed. “I see your point.”