Why Wright Still Matters to Obama’s Campaign

by Faye M. Anderson
– USA –

With only three primaries remaining, the Democratic presidential nomination battle is nearing the finish line. While Barack Obama has won a majority of pledged delegates, he is still short of the 2,026 delegates needed to clinch the nomination.

Even with the nomination “within reach,” the latest Rasmussen poll shows that the number of Democrats who want Hillary Clinton to drop out has declined. Thirty-two percent of Democrats say Clinton should head towards the exit, down from 38 percent two weeks ago.

The fact is, Obama racked up his insurmountable delegate lead before snippets of sermons by Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. exploded on Americans’ TV screens and computer monitors. While Obama has since severed ties with Wright, the political damage has been done.

Obama has lost four of the last six contests. At the same time, his weakness with white voters has been exposed. While Obama won 57 percent of the white vote in Oregon, white folks in the Beaver State are a different shade of white. Portland, to which I plan to move, is arguably ground zero for latte-sipping liberals.

CNN exit polls show that half of voters in West Virginia and Kentucky think Obama shares Wright’s views. In Oregon, where 57 percent of voters self-identify as “liberal,” nearly one-third said Obama thinks Wright’s right.

Michael Barone, senior writer with U.S. News & World Report, recently wrote:

Now West Virginia and Kentucky are not typical primary states. They, together with Arkansas, where Hillary Clinton was first lady for 12 years, were Obama’s weakest states in this year’s primaries. And some percentage of registered Democrats in these states have been voting Republican in recent presidential elections. Nevertheless, the negative verdict these voters render on Obama’s honesty and his relationship with Wright is likely to be typical of some significant quantum of potential Democratic voters this year. And not just in states like West Virginia and Kentucky, which he will certainly lose, but in marginal states which he must carry in order to be elected.

Indeed, a new Quinnipiac poll found that white voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida have doubts about Obama. In all three swing states, roughly 40 percent of white voters say they are less likely to vote for Obama because of his association with Wright. Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, said, “Sen. Obama is losing the white vote by 14-18 points in Ohio and Florida, which is enough to keep him from victory despite overwhelming support from African Americans.”

While Wright is out of the limelight, he is a staple of conservative talk radio and FOX News. Pollster and political strategist (and former advisor to President Clinton) Douglas Schoen told CBS News:

I think the racial component is overstated. I think people have doubts about Barack. I think they have doubts about his program. And I think they have some doubts about people like Reverend Wright. And I don’t think that is necessarily racially motivated, though I would suggest that black liberation theology and some of the outrageous things that Reverend Wright has said certainly raise the specter of concern about race–separate and apart from Barack Obama–with working class voters who might be very, very concerned with the message.

I am skeptical about organized religion so I try to avoid matters of faith. But Obama’s religion factors into his electability. So I checked out a forum earlier this month, “Understanding Black Theology: A 40-Year Retrospective,” organized by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The participants included Dr. James H. Cone of the Union Theological Seminary.

Dr. Cone’s groundbreaking book, Black Theology and Black Power, provided the intellectual framework for black liberation theology. He traced it to a 1968 meeting of the National Committee on Black Churchmen, an ecumenical organization whose members wanted to show black Americans that liberation is consistent with the gospel of Jesus.

Dr. Cone observed, “Black liberation theology asks what it means to love God with your mind. Theology is the critical side of faith. It is faith questioning itself, faith challenging itself. Theology reminds faith not to be too sure of itself. It reminds faith about the contradictions in life. And nothing challenges faith like suffering.”

The civil rights movement was the embodiment of faith and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was its “great interpreter.” But the Christian faith was being challenged as a white man’s religion, most notably by Malcolm X. Dr. Cone said, “When I heard Malcolm and when I heard black power advocates, I asked myself, ‘how can I bring Martin and Malcolm together?’ Malcolm taught me how to be black and I was black before I was anything else. So I couldn’t give that up. I was determined not to give up my faith but I could not ignore the blackness of my existence.”

So to place black liberation theology in context, one must understand the dialectical tension between Dr. King and Malcolm X. If there had been no Malcolm X and no black power movement, there would have been no black liberation theology.

Do I think Obama’s 20-year relationship with Wright is relevant? Yes. As Obama told us, words matter, acknowledging on FOX News Sunday, “The fact that he is my former pastor I think makes it a legitimate political issue.”

In politics, words and associations are fair game.

About the Author
Faye M. Anderson is a citizen journalist and public policy consultant. Her blog, Anderson@Large, was included in the first scholarly research examining the role of black bloggers and the blogosphere. Faye wrote and produced Counting on Democracy, a documentary about the 2000 election debacle, which aired on PBS and Link TV.