Most of us who have watched whole speeches of the Reverend Wright -- especially, say, his address to the NAACP -- come away impressed with his creativity, his wit, and, often, his logic. A typical reaction from a commenter on a HuffPost essay:
I take back some of the comments I made. I just listened to the NAACP speech he made (in it's entirety) and I see why Obama went to his church for 20 years. He shocks you, but into reality and you learn a lot.
Still, as much as I can appreciate Wright's brain, I keep wondering why he won't make a few relatively minor adjustments to mitigate the opportunities for Fox News (et al.) to pounce on tempting soundbites. For instance, if Wright would just add "I'm generalizing here" when he talks about the different learning styles of whites and blacks, it could make a world of difference.
Now we learn that a hard-core Hillary backer was the one who set up Wright's (unfortunate) appearance at the National Press Club.
Was this a conspiracy? More Clintonian sleazeball politics?
Doubtful.
The Reverend Barbara Reynolds, the Clinton backer (who is a member of the Press Club), is of Reverend Wright's generation. She shows genuine disdain for New Politics when she mocks Obama's efforts "to protect his credentials as a unifier above the fray."
Thomas de Zengotita, the HuffPost blogger who sparked the comment that I quoted above ties Wright's easily exploitable style to generational differences.
Jeremiah Wright is like the return of the repressed, a last desperate lunge of the undead 60s toward center stage. Wright represents a longing for enduring relevance so deep that it is willing to sabotage the very possibility of setting out on the long road that runs past race in order to preserve the claims of a certain righteousness, a certain rhetoric, a certain stance -- a familiar and heroic sense of self-in-the-world.
Exit polling in this primary season has certainly shown a generational split in the supporters of Obama and Clinton. But harping on age, of course, is generalizing. (Just look at Jean Weiss.) A more accurate way of describing the split has to do with the extent to which supporters demand "the good fight" or, conversely, seek out new ways of communicating with adversaries.
Hillary's latest appeal to the GOP to stop politicizing Jeremiah Wright may well be another cynical (and hypocritical) ploy, but it also makes a certain sense. Wright's obvious inability to cease fashioning the world in culture-warrior terms is a good fit for Hillary's propensity to exploit the yearnings of those voters who cannot imagine a new way of fighting the bad guys. Some of these voters have simply identified with certain camps for so long that they can't imagine giving up the solidarity they've so grown to appreciate -- a solidarity that once did much good, but that now, often, does little except alienate and divide (see feminists who insist a vote against Hillary is misogynistic). Some voters may not be so beholden to camps, but, more generally, can't see the wisdom of emphasizing communication above fighting.
I'm convinced the current incarnation of the culture wars is on its last legs. The question is whether the last gasps of this style of politics will be loud enough to torpedo Barack's current window of opportunity to lead us toward new styles of communication in 2009.