March 2008 Archives

There is no older tactic in American politics than identifying opponents with their least reputable friends and allies. Jeffersonian Republicans portrayed the Federalists as tools of British monarchists, if not monarchists themselves, while Federalists described Jeffersonians as the American equivalent of bloodthirsty French revolutionaries. Abraham Lincoln repeatedly protested that he was not an abolitionist like John Brown. According to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, supporters of the America First Committee who opposed aid to Great Britain at the risk of war in 1941 were Nazi agents or dupes. Meanwhile, conservatives accused FDR of collaborating with Communists. In his less lucid moments, President Lyndon Johnson believed that grassroots opposition to the Vietnam War was fomented by international Communism. Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale claimed in 1984 that Ronald Reagan would allow Rev. Jerry Falwell to pick the justices of the Supreme Court.

Moreover, all mass movements--and presidential campaigns are mass movements among other things--inevitably contain some weird, crooked, crazy, and vicious people. The America First Committee's supporters included not only many thoughtful foes of FDR's imperial presidency (including young Gerald Ford and John F. Kennedy), but also the group's most famous spokesman, Charles Lindbergh, an anti-Semite and racist. The Communist party of the 1930s and 1940s, which intermittently backed Roosevelt, contained some spies and many character assassins as well as admirable champions of civil rights and organized labor. And long before the invention of the twenty-four hour news cycle, journalists and commentators loved to emphasize the weird, crooked, crazy, and vicious.

Given these long-standing patterns, a speech by Barack Obama dealing with some supporter deemed disreputable by many Americans was all but inevitable. Nonetheless, both the circumstances that required Senator Obama to speak now and the contents of his speech are noteworthy.

As conservative Fox News commentator Sean Hannity has complained, even though Senator Obama's friendship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright has been no secret, the mainstream media have paid slight attention to Wright's opinions. In the past week, however, this story has been mainstreamed in a way that suggests something more than the routine journalistic quest for the lurid.  Rather, newspapers and networks are focusing on Rev. Wright's most volatile remarks for self-protection in the wake of charges that their coverage has been soft on Obama. In the process, the media are framing a fairly common human reality--association with a person whose views are condemned as radical or "politically incorrect" and whose expressions are often over the top--as Something Unusual.  

One of the most sensible comments came from Senator John McCain. Pressed several times by Sean Hannity to attack Obama for his association with Rev. Wright, McCain did not take the bait. Perhaps thinking of his own endorsement by Rev. John Hagee, a classic fundamentalist critic of the Roman Catholic Church as the whore of Babylon, McCain responded with a sigh that a presidential candidate does not agree with every opinion expressed by everyone who likes him and/or whom he likes.

Come to think of it, even though I'm not a candidate for anything, neither do I. And probably, gentle reader, neither do you (unless, of course, you are a self-righteous zealot which, in turn, makes you at least slightly disreputable in the eyes of most Americans). And it has been amply documented that men and women frequently attend churches, synagogues, and mosques even though they disagree with--or barely notice--the core doctrines of the clergy. They like the tradition or the ambiance or the community or the social services. This Easter Sunday, millions of Catholics who use birth control and favor legal abortion will attend services led by priests, bishops, and cardinals who disagree vehemently and may even address these issues. Millions of conservative Protestants will listen to sermons by classic fundamentalists like Rev. Hagee without viewing their Catholic neighbors as agents of the Antichrist. Except for a tiny minority of our fellow citizens who are closely scrutinized public figures, this human capacity to live with inconsistent thoughts and feelings, not to mention with unconventional friends, will not be publicized as Something Unusual and disreputable.

Public figures typically offer two responses to the charge of guilt by association with disreputable friends and allies. The first is a vigorous disassociation from the opinions and, usually, from the person who uttered them. The second is to countercharge that the other side's disreputable friends and allies are just as bad and probably worse.

Senator Obama employed both of these tactics not only with skill but also with unusual thoughtfulness. He separated himself from Rev. Wright's "incendiary language" and mistaken beliefs, generally described. He prudently chose not to address point by point Wright's assertions about specific issues which, as he noted, are now available in "snippets" in an "endless loop" on television and YouTube. Unbound by presidential aspirations, the rest of us can notice that Wright's range of opinions included sensible advice as well as wacky assertions. We do not have to agree with the wacky assertions--for instance, that whites deliberately disseminate AIDS among African Americans or that the United States deliberately provoked the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor--to consider Wright's grossly expressed point that the al Qaeda attack on 9/11 was connected in complicated ways to United States Mideast policy (much as the raid on Pearl Harbor was connected in complicated ways to United States Asian policy two generations ago). Our foreign policy would benefit if this question were not taboo (as Ron Paul discovered amid a chorus of boos during a Republican presidential debate).  

Instead of trying to navigate his way through opinions that ranged from sensible to absurd, Obama stressed the normality of working with and loving a minister whose views he sometimes found objectionable. Simply put, Wright had helped to strengthen Obama's personal faith, and Wright's ministry at Trinity United Church of Christ had served the community well.

Then, in ways unusual under these circumstances, Obama went beyond self-defense to teach some complex lessons consistent with the general themes of his campaign. Wright's expressions of anger at whites, though hardly the sum of his worldview, reflected the attitudes of his congregation. The pastor contained within himself, Obama said, the "contradictions--the good and the bad--of the community that he has served diligently for so many years." Trinity accepted the "black community in its entirety--the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger." Indeed, in the broadest sense, the congregation contained "in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and, yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America." African Americans needed to acknowledge this complexity, "embracing the burden of our past without becoming victims of our past." Nor should whites ignore the complexity. The "anger is real," Obama said, and it is also legitimate.

Even legitimate anger must not be exploited by demagogues, Obama warned. Furthermore, the bitterness could be diminished. In some ways, Wright's anger represented the honorable but outdated gut feeling of "his generation" that had come of age during the last days of the segregation era.       

While distancing himself from Rev. Wright's "divisive" views, Obama did two things that are rare in politics. He openly criticized aspects of his own core constituency. Then he respected the rest of the electorate enough to try to explain that constituency's furies and fears. He offered no African-American equivalent of the blarney that was used (with good political effect) to make Irish-Catholic John Kennedy less threatening to Protestants in 1960.

Obama's discussion of what is typically called the "white backlash" is even more remarkable. Adapting the standard tactic, he countercharged that conservatives had dishonorably manipulated white racial fears for "at least a generation." He stated but did not belabor the obvious. "Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism."

At the same time, Obama neither guilt-tripped working class and lower middle class whites who joined the Reagan coalition nor denigrated their feelings as a "paranoid style." Their anger is "similar" to that of many African Americans.  Here, too, understanding and empathy are necessary when whites complain, even in heated rhetoric, about urban crime, affirmative action, and mandatory school busing to achieve integration. Obama admitted that his white maternal grandmother, "who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world," expressed fear of black men she passed on the street and "on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

Not only is Obama's candor remarkable--how many presidential candidates have admitted to imperfect grandmothers?--but so too is his matter-of-fact acceptance of human flaws and frailties. He does not require Americans to deny their less-than-admirable gut feelings and profess love for one another. Appeals of that sort, Obama seems to sense, are utopian, despite their sentimental charm. Rather, he urges Americans to "come together" in practical solidarity to work on common problems.  

Obama has said frequently that the "audacity of hope" does not imply mindless optimism. In his March 18 speech, he recalled the Civil War and subsequent struggle to move the United States toward racial equality. Elsewhere he has celebrated labor's battles against Pinkerton strike breakers. Obama may underestimate how hard it will be to define common goals for 300 million Americans, not to mention the amount of conflict still needed to achieve significant social and economic change. But he is not naive. Rather, as a few commentators have noted, Obama is a kind of Niebuhrian. In its tough analysis of human relations, his speech is a thoughtful contribution to Christian realism as well as an able political defense.

Leo P. Ribuffo is Society of the Cincinnati George Washington Distinguished Professor of History at George Washington University.