AMERICA'S ORIGINAL SIN: OBAMA, REV. WRIGHT AND POLITICS OF NATIONAL SECURITY - April 7, 2008

For the past month the Democratic primary race has been in a peculiar state of suspension. After three months with primaries or caucuses every week or two, none will be held until 22 April, when Pennsylvania votes. The campaigns continue. Events – most notably, video snippets from sermons by Barack Obama's longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and Obama's response to Wright's potentially inflammatory remarks – have impinged on the race. A steady flood of polls provide goats' entrails for analysts and commentators to pore over, but there have been no votes to test the effect on actual voter sentiment.
In the March 4 primaries, especially Ohio and Texas, Barack Obama failed to score wins that would have effectively secured him the nomination. Nevertheless his numerical lead of some 160 elected delegates (out of 2025 total delegates needed for the nomination) is unlikely to be greatly eroded even if Hillary dominates the remaining contests. While the nearly 800 superdelegates are free agents under the party rules, as a group they will be deeply reluctant to overturn a majority of the elected delegates. Hillary's remaining prospects hinge on events overriding their reluctance.

 
By far the most important such events will be the remaining primaries. If Hillary gains the momentum on those late contests

(in which about 550 delegates will be chosen) – she cannot hope

to overcome Obama's lead in elected delegates, but she might well

end the primary season with more actual votes having been cast

for her than for Obama. Such a result would give her some moral

suasion, allowing her to argue to the superdelegates that they are

overturning not the will of the electorate but merely the mechanics

of the delegate selection process, including the awkward denial of

delegates to Michigan and especially Florida.

   
How likely is any of this? Most US political observers are saying

slim to none, while acknowledging the adage that prediction is

difficult, especially about the future. If the remaining primaries

unfold overall as the previous ones have – with both Obama and

Hillary generally winning the states they are expected to win –

Obama's lead will be unshaken both numerically and

psychologically, and about 100 superdelegates shifting into his

camp will be enough to close the deal. This is the most likely outcome.

 
It is not, however, a predetermined outcome, and Hillary has weathered a week or so of pressure from media pundits and Obama supporters to bow out of the race. This pressure itself was a backlash of sorts to a series of events that unfolded during March. Barack Obama is a longtime member of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, whose recently retired chief pastor, Wright, was by Obama's own description his spiritual mentor. Videos of several fiery Wright sermons turned up on YouTube, including one delivered shortly after 9/11 that sharply criticized US policy in the Middle East. The videos got heavy play in the mainstream media, and Obama was compelled to respond with a televised speech on a subject he has been reluctant to address on the campaign trail: race.

 
Discussion of the Wright controversy, at least among

Democrats and in the media, has like Obama's

response centered primarily on race. Rev. Wright's

fierce rhetoric – in sharp contrast to Obama's own –

evokes earlier "angry" African-American political

figures, such as Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton.

(Martin Luther King, in his lifetime, was also

regarded as "angry" by many whites, a fact largely

obscured in his modern hagiography.) Were Obama,

as the Democratic nominee, to become identified

with the sort of racially polarized politics associated

with Jackson or Sharpton, his general election

prospects would be grim indeed.

 
Obama's well-received speech on race was designed to push back against this association, and distance himself from Rev. Wright, by simultaneously offering a context for the racial narrative and an alternative to it, a generational narrative. In Obama's telling, African-American leaders of the 60s generation came of age during the Civil Rights struggle and were shaped by it. Obama, a generation younger (culturally if not quite chronologically) is himself a creation of the Civil Rights struggle. He stands across a gulf from his mentor, separated by a bridge that Rev. Wright cannot fully cross even though he helped to build it.

 
This is a powerful counter-narrative. It speaks to a large segment of white Americans for whom electing a black president represents a triumph over the nation's Original Sin of proclaiming freedom while embracing slavery. (For better or worse, the language of Protestant moral seriousness is always prominent in US politics.) Obama's generational response on race also weaves seamlessly into his broader generational argument against Hillary Clinton and prospectively against John McCain. Obama portrays the whole toxic element of US politics – "culture wars" and death-match politics – is to Obama a continual refighting of the 1960s by people who came of age then. He, with no personal stake in those old fights, offers to take the country beyond them.

 
Rev. Wright's videotaped sermons, however, also lend themselves to another narrative that has nothing to do with race, but could prove equally toxic for Obama in the general election: national security, and lurking behind it questions of patriotism and nationalism. Republicans and conservatives have long argued a narrative of US foreign relations in which Democrats and liberals are at best naïve about the world – especially the role of power and force – and at worst guilty of divided loyalties. In either form, this narrative portrays liberals as unwilling to recognize that some foreign powers and forces are both ruthless and uninterested in dialogue, and can be met only by force. Worse, in the conservative narrative, liberals are far too willing to "blame America first" – precisely what Wright can be accused of doing.

 
Variations on this theme have been recurrent in Republican campaigns at every level, including presidential elections, and have not infrequently played a central role - from undermining John Kerry's Vietnam war record in 2004, adding swiftboating to the US political lexicon, to the elder George Bush's effective use of the Pledge of Allegiance and flag-burning against Michael Dukakis in 1988. This theme did not originate in the 1960s. It goes back far beyond the Vietnam war to the immediate postwar years, and took its most explosive form with the career of Sen. Joe McCarthy in the late 1940s and 1950s.

  
If both Obama and Rev. Wright were white, and Obama became the Democratic nominee, Republicans (whether the McCain campaign or outside groups) would certainly use Wright's sermons against Obama, arguing that he too is inclined to "blaming America first." They are unlikely to refrain from doing so because Wright and Obama are black. Obama's speech indirectly rebuts this charge only by implying that African-American leaders of Wright's generation should be given a pass, so to speak, for rhetoric that would otherwise fall outside the bounds of acceptable (white) US political discourse. This is a difficult case for Obama to argue if pressed, however, since it amounts to asking for a sort of ideological affirmative action.
Although the national security issue and its immediate lurkers-behind of patriotism and nationalism have no racial content, behind nationalism in turn lurks nativism, which in turn has deep historical ties to racism. When a black man named Barack Hussein Obama is involved, national security as a political issue is not just about ideology or world view. For the McCain campaign this could prove a bit of a double-edged sword. A segment of the electorate may be receptive to the argument that Obama is dangerously naïve and inexperienced when it comes to national security, but be repelled by racist overtones, and Republicans must be wary of a backfire.

 
If this entanglement of national security with race may be somewhat problematic for McCain in the fall, it is enormously problematic for Hillary. The Democratic primary electorate is broadly drawn from the third of voters who are least liable to be worried about Obama's alleged lack of experience and toughness on national security policy, and most likely to be offended by a whiff of racial politics. Moreover, given the close race so far, the "swing vote" Hillary seeks to draw in the remaining primaries is near the center of the Democratic primary electorate, well left of the center of the electorate as a whole.

  
In fact, Hillary's main argument is an indirect one, and aimed as much at the superdelegates than the remaining primary voters. While she argues that Obama is in fact both inexperienced and naïve, her more salient argument is that the symbolism of national security and patriotism, as embodied by Wright, would be fatal for Obama in the general election. It is possible to agree with Obama on the substance, and be more or less unoffended by Rev. Wright's statements, and still believe they will drag Obama down in the fall.
Polling, however, so far lends no obvious support to Hillary's argument. Obama maintains a fairly consistent if narrow lead in national primary polls. While both he and Hillary have suffered modestly in general election trial heats, generally running slightly behind McCain, Obama does no worse than Hillary, and there is no indication in polling that the Wright issue has seriously hurt him.

  
Nevertheless, and in spite of the gradually hardening conventional wisdom that Obama's lead in elected delegates is insurmountable, there has still been no strong movement toward the Obama camp among the 300 or so remaining uncommitted superdelegates. They are apparently willing to await the next round of primaries, starting with Pennsylvania on 22 April, before coming down off the fence. One factor is surely a lurking concern among career Democratic politicians – from whom the superdelegates are drawn – that Obama is vulnerable in the general election on an issue that has long played well for Republicans.

Rick Robinson

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Author of the article holds B.A. degree in Economics from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and M.A. degree in English from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California . Mr. Robinson worked as a county-level campaigner in Dukakis (1988) and Clinton (1992) presidential campaigns. He presently works as a journalist and political commentator.

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