"That is just terrible, absolutely dreadful," a prominent supporter of Barack Obama said Monday morning after listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s screed at the National Press Club. He proposed to me that the presidential candidate at long last must denounce his former pastor, unequivocally and immediately. It took 28 hours after a tepid early reaction Monday, but Obama finally did it Tuesday afternoon.
Did that solve Obama’s pastor problem? Leading Democrats certainly hope so, but they are not sure. His vulnerability transcends relations with a radical preacher. If Obama comes to be seen not as a presidential candidate who happens to be black but as a black candidate in the mold of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, he will face a difficult struggle in the general election against John McCain even if he bests Hillary Clinton.
The problem goes back to the reaction Obama and his strategist David Axelrod crafted about two months ago, when videos of Wright’s racist sermons first circulated. Insisting that Wright’s incendiary remarks had been taken out of context, Obama took the high road in delivering a widely praised speech on race March 18 in Philadelphia.…Over the past two years, Obama on occasion has appeared with Wright and praised him as a valued counselor and dear friend of the family. The title of his best-selling book "The Audacity of Hope" is from a Wright sermon. But Obama on Tuesday summarily dismissed the man who used to be his spiritual mentor as a "pastor," just as Wright had dismissed him as a "politician."
Nobody knows whether Obama’s performance has damaged his candidacy permanently, but his supporters hope the issue is out of the news. The difficulty is that Jeremiah Wright, thrown under the bus by his former parishioner, can reemerge any time he wishes and renew discussion of the Democratic presidential front-runner’s real identity…
Republican Spin is hard at first. You read or listen to the piece, and then you start arguing with its logic or maybe its conclusions. But that’s ineffective, because Spin isn’t like that. If there are facts in it, they are superfluous to the argument. Parsing the logic went out with the Greeks a long time ago except in Courtrooms and High School debate clubs. The power of Spin isn’t in the selective take on fact, or in the logic, or even in the conclusions. It’s in the implications.
The second implication: It’s in the last line. "…the Democratic presidential front-runner’s real identity." Novak keeps open the implication that Barak Obama is really a black candidate in disguise – his real identity being a Jeremiah Wright or a Jesse Jackson underneath. While he’s right that Wright can do whatever he wants, Novak having made this into nothing but a political ploy in the first place, he now leaves open Obama’s real identity as something to be decided by the populace or the Press or Jeremiah Wright – something different from what we see and what Obama says.
Novak did the same thing to Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. He didn’t say Joseph Wilson was not credible, or not telling the truth. He simply implied that he was sent by his wife, a C.I.A. Agent to Niger – and that therefore his conclusions were suspect. Novak is a character assasin of the first magnitude, but only by implication. By sitting on the sidelines as if he were a political observer, working only with implication, he’s able to sow his seeds of doubt without ever saying anything directly.
What do I think about Novak’s opinions? What am I implying? As Obama said about Wright, "enough is enough." Robert Novak is not a political analyst, he’s a coward and a Republican Whore – one of their kings of Spin. That column isn’t an oped. It’s a political ad.
[…] highlights don’t do justice to the full effect of Novak’s technique. In my recent post, King of Spin, I claimed Robert Novak was not a political analyst, but rather a "a coward and a Republican […]