Why Wright is wrong for Obama - JONAH GOLDBERG

Taken from today's Los Angeles Times OP-ED

The candidate's message of unity is suspect if he doesn't divorce himself from the controversial pastor.
March 18, 2008

Barack Obama will reportedly give a major speech this morning at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, addressing the controversy about his extremist pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

Obama needs to do two things. First, he needs to make it incandescently clear that Wright doesn't speak for him in any meaningful way. If he won't do that, his campaign is a fraud and he is not qualified to be president.

Second, he needs to explain to black America why Wright's views are so poisonous.

By now, if you've paid any attention at all, you've read the quotes and seen the video clips of Wright at the pulpit. A supporter of Louis Farrakhan, Wright has echoed his view that the U.S. government created AIDS to perpetrate a black genocide. He suggested that America had it coming on 9/11.

His most infamous from-the-pulpit sound bite -- at least to date -- is this from a 2003 sermon: "The government gives [blacks] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America!"

Obama and his surrogates are denouncing attempts to link the candidate and the views of his pastor and mentor. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) on "Fox News Sunday," for instance, said, "Guilt by association is not typically American. We've all been around in places where people have given speeches or said things that we've thoroughly objected to, totally objected to."

OK. But even Obama didn't spin it that way. More implausibly, Obama claimed that he'd never heard his mentor say anything of the sort, in public or private.

Obama has been a member of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ for 20 years. Wright baptized Obama's daughters; he officiated at Obama's wedding. The title of Obama's career-making book "The Audacity of Hope" is from a Wright sermon. Wright worked with Obama as a community organizer. Saying you were out back catching a smoke during one sermon or another won't cut it. The issue isn't what Obama sat through, but what he stands for.

Even Wright's tone is poisonous.

Obama righteously deplores "divisiveness." And yet he literally worships at the altar of division. He wants to transcend race, but his black nationalist church and his liberation theology pastor consider race permanent and central issues.

Obama claims that he's a different kind of politician, but his "repudiation" of Wright last week is traditional pol-speak and nothing more. To listen to Obama, you'd think he was the only person in Chicago not to know that his minister is a hatemonger. Either Obama is the worst judge of character in living memory or he's not the man he's been portraying himself as.

Or there's a third option. Perhaps Obama didn't hear Wright's bilious rhetoric because it blended in with the chorus around him. This is the fact that Obama really needs to address if the "Obama movement" is about more than getting the junior senator from Illinois elected.

What does it say that Trinity United Church is the most popular in Obama's old state Senate district, with a membership of 8,500? One of Wright's flock responded to the controversy by telling ABC News, "I wouldn't call [Wright's theology] radical. I call it being black in America." NPR's Michelle Norris explained on "Meet the Press" that Wright's tone, at least, is "not something that is unusual" in black churches.

A Rasmussen poll released Monday found that 29% of blacks surveyed said Wright's comments made them more likely to support Obama, while only 18% said the opposite, and half said Wright's comments would have no effect on them.

That is a symptom of a problem that platitudinous "hope" cannot alone remedy.

A 2005 study by the Rand Corp. and the University of Oregon found that nearly half of African Americans say they believe that HIV is man-made. More than 25% think that it's a government invention, and one in eight say it was created and spread by the CIA. Just over half believe that the government is purposely keeping a cure from reaching the poor.

And please, spare me the rationalization that blacks have reason to be conspiratorial. Doubtless there's truth to that. But that doesn't make the conspiracy theories any more true or any less destructive.

In the 2005 issue of Social Science Quarterly, Sharon Parsons and William Simmons tried to explain why conspiracy theories like these persist in the black community. Part of the answer, they concluded, is that black politicians have no interest in dispelling them. Paging Sen. Obama!

Obama preaches unity. Well, real unity requires real truth-telling and the ability to tell right from wrong, and Wright from right.

I, for one, have no interest in being united with Wright or anyone who insists that America is an evil, racist, damnable nation bent on murdering black people -- and I suspect neither will many general election voters.

Obama's power base is made up of black voters and the upscale left-wingers who condescend to them. Well, it is time he spoke truth to that power. If the eloquent, self-proclaimed truth-teller and would-be first black president can't manage that, he should go straight from would-be to never was.

jgoldberg@latimescolumnists.com