Over at The Huffington Post, Leonce Gaiter writes, "If Reverend Jeremiah Wright and his former disciple, Barack Obama were white, this would not be a story." Oddly enough, I've actually been thinking about this a lot lately. And I've come to the conclusion that it's not totally true. If Jeremiah Wright were white, it would be a very different story, but a story just the same. The comments of Wright's that have really driven the national conversation were not particularly race-focused. Rather, they were very, very far left -- strong restatements of the traditional left wing critique of American imperialism, a dismissal of the idea that America is always and everywhere motivated by virtue, and explicit sympathy for the blowback hypothesis that suggests that though 9/11 was obviously unjust, it was also a predictable eventual consequence of our actions. So here's the thought experiment: If in 2004, it turned out that John Kerry's minister of 20 years -- a man who had been like a father to him, who had married Kerry and Theresa Heinz, and who figured heavily into Kerry's autobiographical book -- held the same opinions as Wright, how big of a deal would it be? My sense, as we're seeing with the furor over Obama's laughably casual relationship with Bill Ayers, is it would still be a firestorm. Americans recoil from the Chomskyite critique, and any Democratic candidate whose personal relationships implied a sympathy for that worldview would have a tough time of it. In fact, it looks like this is the narrative Wright is really fitting into -- a narrative that ranges from Ayers to lapel pins to Obama not holding his hand on his heart during the national anthem -- rather than a story of racial strife. That's not to say it hasn't reawoken racial fears, and it's certainly not to suggest that Wright won't be used by racists in the election, but I think you can imagine this being a political problem if the preacher was white, too.
