×
BOY, SOMEBODY'S MAD. Speaking of tricky, The New York Times's Jodi Kantor reports this morning that Barack Obama disinvited his pastor and spiritual mentor from speaking at his Feb. 10 announcement in Springfield on the recommendation of campaign consultants concerned that the pastor would be perceived as too radical. The pastor, for his part, seems a little ticked off. Either that or naive about how to speak to the press:
The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., senior pastor of the popular Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago and spiritual mentor to Senator Barack Obama, thought he knew what he would be doing on Feb. 10, the day of Senator Obama�s presidential announcement.After all, back in January, Mr. Obama had asked Mr. Wright if he would begin the event by delivering a public invocation.But Mr. Wright said Mr. Obama called him the night before the Feb. 10 announcement and rescinded the invitation to give the invocation.�Fifteen minutes before Shabbos I get a call from Barack,� Mr. Wright said in an interview on Monday, recalling that he was at an interfaith conference at the time. �One of his members had talked him into uninviting me,� Mr. Wright said, referring to Mr. Obama�s campaign advisers....In Monday�s interview, Mr. Wright expressed disappointment but no surprise that Mr. Obama might try to play down their connection.�When his enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli� to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Mr. Wright recalled, �with Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.� Mr. Wright added that his trip implied no endorsement of either Louis Farrakhan�s views or Qaddafi�s.Mr. Wright said that in the phone conversation in which Mr. Obama disinvited him from a role in the announcement, Mr. Obama cited an article in Rolling Stone, �The Radical Roots of Barack Obama.�According to the pastor, Mr. Obama then told him, �You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we�ve decided is that it�s best for you not to be out there in public.�Obama's trajectory in the national polls is such that I fully expect him to pass Hillary Clinton by summer, if not before, and become the front-runner. This is where things are going to get very challenging for him. Once he's the front-runner, he will be subject to a high level of scrutiny and attack that he's so far not attracted, since he's still in the "get to know you" phase of his press coverage. It will be a very, very, very long and hot summer, and by fall, when the campaign begins in earnest, he will be tarnished and weakened. I doubt he'll have all that much of a leg up on Hillary in the polls at that point, since I don't expect he'll ever get out that much in front of her. He'll be taking fire from John Edwards, too, as well as national media. I have no idea on how things will play out from there, or who will win the nomination, but it does seem clear that the Obama of Fall '07 is going to look pretty different from the guy we're seeing today. At the very least, he's going to look much more calculating (as in the above) and much more like a typical politician, because there's no way to run a campaign for the presidency without making some obvious tactical moves.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
