Down at TPM Cafe, FlyOnTneWall has a very interesting post on the realities of Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., the pastor at Obama’s Church.
Specifically, he discusses the Fox News (who else) coverage of a rather incendiary sermon in which he makes it clear that he supports Obama.
Ostensibly, the article is about the potential implications with the IRS, but in reality Fox uses it get some potentially disastrous sound bites on the table.
In addition to the use of the N-Word, and describing Bill Clinton as having done the Black community, “just like he did Monica”, which I think that Obama can, and did defuse with his “crazy uncle” disavowal, there are some statements that are far more troubling from a political perspective:
Brian Ross’s report for Good Morning America on Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, is potentially a huge problem for Obama. In the piece, Ross has clips of Wright delivering sermons in which he says we should not say God Bless America, but God “Damn” America, in which he calls America the US of KKKA (referring to how racist the country is), and in which he says about September 11 that America’s “chickens have come home to roost.”
From a purely tactical perspective, he needs to get ahead of this story, and he needs to do so in the next few days.
If he waits until Monday, it may well be too late.
It is necessarily a painful thing, after all, Rev. Wright’s has been his pastor for over 20 years, but these are the sound bites that will be used to destroy his campaign.
Rev. Wright is not Louis Farrakhan, but the political reality in the US in 2008 is that he will have to be disavowed and denounced in the same manner, and even then you will still see his clips all over Fox News.
He needs not to repeat Clinton’s weakness with Ferraro.
The Republicans are salivating at the opportunity to turn Obama into the scary angry black man. It’s not fair, it’s just the way it is.
They need to throw Wright off the bus, and back up over him, and do it again, and then tie an anchor to him and throw him in the river.