Obama supporters say that the Wright stuff didn't significantly damage Obama. And they're arguing that Obama should just put the matter behind him. I disagree and propose a method for bringing back disaffected voters. This concern seems important for our future as we try to build enough of a majority to create substantial and lasting progressive change.
To take the Wright problem more seriously than you may now do, consider the NY Times report of the results of highly regarded exit polls in Indiana and North Carolina. Seventy three percent of Hillary voters agreed that the situation with Wright was "very important." Some readers of early drafts of this blog missed the all important detail: that these people voted for Clinton. This questionaire item is only ambiguous for people who voted for Obama, not ones who voted for Clinton. The Clinton voters obviously meant that the Wright stuff pushed them away from Obama. (Continued below.)
Of course, there are other grounds for dismissing the importance of this report, like the argument that, because Obama is black, these voters would never vote for him anyway. But there's no proof of that, and it's just as likely that, however tentative these voters might be about voting for a black man, if the Wright stuff could more effectively be put to rest, at least some percentage of them would support him in the general election and thereafter vote for congressional candidates alligned with him.
Consider also that 18 percent of the people who voted for Hillary in IN and NC said they would vote for McCain, which agrees with previous polls. Add that many person-on-the street interviews reveal that some people who were for Obama switched after the Wright stuff came out. And the problem isn't only that they think he's a closet radical. It's also that they think he is lying. The report reveals that 47 percent of these Democrat respondents believed that he renounced his ties with Wright only because it would help him politically, not because he really disagreed with what Wright said; only 34 percent thought he really disagreed. That undercuts one of his most attractive features, his honesty and promise to change politics in the direction of honesty and transparency. Some early readers of this blog argued that these people were very tentative, marginal Obama supporters, so we shouldn't be concerned with them. But even if this kind of swing voter represents only two percent of the electorate, it seems important to at least consider alternate strategies for converting them back to Obama.
In what follows, I lay out a method for reaching them that's exemplified in a five minute successful attempt to do that with an acquaintance of mine, Marlene. Marlene is a smart woman, and she intensely liked Obama until the Wright flap emerged. Gradually, she became completely turned off to him. I think she's representative of at least some swing voters who used to be for Obama and were turned off by the Wright stuff. And my success in changing her mind back again makes the point that my method may be a good model for reaching people who are swung away from Obama by the wrong Wright stuff.
Early readers of this draft wrote her off as an "idiot," but she may seem stupid only because she is not as well informed as many of us politics junkies. She's not into politics much more than the average voter, on whom I think we should focus. Moreover, keep in mind that guilt by association politics once ruled this country, and smart people bought into it. Moreover, brilliant people couldn't enable the average, non-ideological person to see through it during the beginning and middle stages of the McCarthy era. And Professor Obama hasn't done a great job either, so it may be that intelligence has less effect than the difficulty of the intellectual and psychological problem posed by the guilt by association tactic.
It may be that guilt by association is difficult to unravel, as some bloggers have shown, because, among other things, it requires the knowledge of the arcane science principle that you can't prove that something didn't happen. For instance, you can't beyond all doubt prove that Obama isn't a closet radical. Moreover, a troubling association is a good clue that the person might be guilty. It has that cachet adding to the difficulty of seeing through it. And most voters don't have the training or the inclination to undertake an internet search for crucial details of Obama's life and marhsall the kind of critical thinking needed to see through a guilt by association charge. The point here is that it makes much less sense to write off people who succumb to guilt by association than it does to take them seriously and try to create a method for reaching them.
Marlene began our conversation, shaking her head and saying, "He's too radical." She explained that he was associated with Wright for too long.
The length of their association is part of the now entrenched argument against Obama. People say that, in 20 years, Obama must have learned how radical Wright was. I immediately brought out my most compelling argument. I said, "If Obama is a radical, you would think that, during his 25 years of adulthood and four years of college at Columbia University in New York, someone would have overheard him at least make a radical remark." She nodded in agreement.
Despite her newfound understanding, I knew she hadn't really changed her mind. I have learned from my experience as a psychotherapist that people's beliefs are densely backed up by related beliefs, a bit like an octopus. You wound one tentacle, and another one grabs you. Mistaken beliefs are also like involved prejudices. Just because one black woman gets a PhD in nuclear physics doesn't change the mind of a complexly prejudiced racist.
Despite my compelling argument, Marlene retrenched, saying, "But they were so close. Wasn't Wright his mentor?" Their intimacy is particularly compelling to many people with whom I've talked. If two people are close, they must at least partly agree with each other. A beginning of a counter-argument is that I'm close with my father and have learned much from him, but he was for Goldwater, and I was for Kennedy. I brought out my next most compelling argument. I said,
But Wright is not a relentlessly hateful man. He preached love and forgiveness too. He cared deeply about many people regardless of race. He even went to the White House to offer Bill Clinton solace during his impeachment debacle. He has white people in his church, and perhaps most important, he always qualifies his hateful remarks, softening them. Moreover, it's not as though Obama was sitting in church listening to Wright say over and over again things like, "The US government infected black people with AIDS." It can seem like that, because the media has repeated that kind of statement many times.
She argued, "But why would he tolerate any of that kind of stuff?" I explained,
Again, Wright was many things. He helped thousands of people. He is amazingly intelligent and literate. He has many insightful, rewarding beliefs. He was very loving many times, and the national predominantly white mainstream denomination of which his church was a member highly praised him. He became like an uncle to Obama. And if an uncle that you respect and love over many years occasionally says crazy things that you don't believe, you don't give up on him. That's in Obama's favor. He should tolerate the occasional rant of a person he cares about. Nobody abandons an admired, beloved near-relative, unless, as the media impression suggests, he's constantly in your face with hate speech, is doing no good for the community, and has nothing respectful and rewarding to say.
She seemed affected by my argument, but she had worked with people suffering from AIDS and thought Wright's inflammatory AIDS comment was especially horrible. I could see that she was filled with resentment toward Wright that had built up over several months. I argued that
it's important to know that Wright has reason to be angry, and when you're angry, you exaggerate. His reason is indirectly related to the AIDS crisis. He knows for a fact that the US government authorized a deadly experiment involving black prisoners. Although there was an effective treatment for syphilis, the government withheld treatment from the prisoners to observe the late-stage symptoms of the disease. Add to this closely related information the knowledge that many ordinary, entirely innocent black people were hung, shot, and bombed only because they were black. And their grievances have not been feelingfully redressed; no one in white America has ever built a shrine to Medgar Evers or even Dr. King.
More than anything, this verifiable information affected Marlene. All of my arguments affected her, but, again, the network of ideas supporting her disaffection kept springing up in her mind to carry her away into another sub-point.
Another one leapt to mind in the partly disjointed, disorganized way many people, regardless of their intelligence, tend to think. She said, "So why did he completely reject him only recently. If he respected Wright and shouldn't have completely rejected him as you say, it seems now that he's rejecting him only for political reasons." I explained that Wright severely undermined Obama by, in effect, calling him a liar. Wright said that the only reason Obama is disagreeing with him in public is because he's a politician. I said, "I'm angry at him too; he's undermining a movement I think is vital for this country by playing to the worries of people who don't know Obama well." This argument was very satisfying to Marlene.
I then took on all of the arguments convicting Obama at once with another of my Nuclear Option arguments. I said,
Notice how, just as the media has, you're spending much of your time listing Wright's sin and no time listing Obama's except his association with Wright. You're building up evidence against and anger at Wright, and it's leaking over to Obama. It's as though the accumulation of bad things Wright has done seem to confirm Obama's guilt; when you think about that, it seems obviously incorrect. It seems that this repetition and accumulation of clues without proof feels like proof; it's a psychological trick, or flim flam.
Similarly, the accumulation of specific aspects of Obama's association with Wright seem to add weight to your argument against Obama. Wright was mentor, sounding board, officiator at Obama's wedding, officiator at Obama's daughters' baptisms, in Obama's committee on religion for his campaign, a political advisor in his Senate campaigns, a supporter of Obama's, and more. It's as though the accumulation of associations and the intimacy of some of them proves Obama's guilt. It feels like proof. But again, there isn't any proof. There's no proof that Obama ever said or did any radical or dishonest thing.
To close the sale, I did what I've recommended elsewhere that Obama do. I got above the Obama-Wright fray and addressed the country wide problem we're having with guilt by association. I said this guilt by association is an important problem for all Americans. It is possible to use false accusations to hijack elections, to so completely deceive people that they vote for someone who won't represent their interests. They vote for that person only because the other candidate was severely tainted by guilt by association attacks. So we've got to learn as a nation that associations are no proof at all. They're only clues. And when these kinds of charges are made, we should demand, "Where's the proof." Give us at least some hearsay that the candidate said or did something wrong. And if you can't do that and you only keep repeating the associations and the guilt you think they prove, then your repetitive accusations should be denounced for subverting the election process.
Obama needs to make a major address on this topic, precisely because the disaffected voters' beliefs are complex and yet amenable to reason. He can elevate to his statesman role rather than defensively dealing just with the attacks against him, thus showing, as he did in his speech on race, that he is the kind of leader we can deeply respect and follow.