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Wright drives a wedge between Obama and whites

BY CLARENCE PAGE | Clarence Page is a syndicated Chicago Tribune columnist based in Washington.

May 1, 2008

For weeks the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was right to castigate those who used sound bites from his fiery sermons to paint him as "some sort of fanatic." But his latest wounds are self-inflicted. And, as Sen. Barack Obama's recently retired pastor, Wright is taking the Illinois Democrat's presidential campaign down, too.

Wright chose to reveal the real Wright only days after Obama's Pennsylvania primary loss to Sen. Hillary Clinton. That primary exposed weaknesses in Obama's ability to connect with white working class voters.

Wright was given a golden opportunity to correct the distorted image portrayed in his sound bites. He could have helped his 20-year congregant's efforts to win votes in Indiana and North Carolina. But he blew it.

At first, we saw Wright's best angels revealed in an exclusive hourlong interview that he gave to Bill Moyers on PBS's "Bill Moyers Journal." Posted on the program's PBS.org Web site, it is Wright's first interview since the controversy erupted. He comes off as the thoughtful scholar, a graduate of Howard University and the University of Chicago Divinity School who built his church from 78 members in the early 1970s to more than 7,000 today and gained national respect in theological circles.

He explains and gives context to his controversial snippets, backed up by longer video excerpts than the short attention span of television news usually allows. Wright explains black liberation theology in terms of black Christian history in a way that's not scary to reasonable white folks.

Better late than never, Moyers' program offers viewers a chance to see that, whether you agree with him or not, Wright is not a nut case or "wackadoodle," as some have portrayed him. You can also see why, as many have wondered, Obama was impressed enough with the man to answer Wright's call to Christ.

Unfortunately, the good that Wright did for himself on Moyers' show was largely undone by Wright's excessive showboating at his heavily covered news conference at the National Press Club in Washington Monday.

His ego and flair for the theatrical got the better of him in front of a firing squad of news cameras and a dining room populated to the walls with his supporters and fellow religious leaders.

Wright played to his audience by taunting his conservative critics. Instead of calming controversial waters for Obama's benefit as well as his own, Wright pumped up call-and-response applause and cheers from his supporters, giving the news conference the sound and feel of a church revival combined with a political rally.

He defended the Minister Louis Farrakhan's attacks against Zionism. He equated criticisms of himself with an attack on the black church and black Americans as a whole. Instead of backing away from his paranoid accusation that AIDS could be a genocidal government plot, he cited other historic scandals to defend the possibility.

Wright's entitled to his opinions. Nevertheless, as a champion of black advancement, it is hard to believe that he does not realize - or doesn't care about - the damage that he is doing to the first African-American to have a realistic shot at being president.

Beware the sin of vanity, Reverend.