Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

In the Barack Obama-Jeremiah Wright affair, a tragedy of sorts is playing itself out before our eyes. We have the first African-American presidential candidate in American history who has a serious chance of capturing the nomination of his party and the presidency itself.

Because of this, there is an underlying nervousness among Americans about what it might mean. This nervousness may be in the process of turning into a backlash much like the one that confronted Martin Luther King is his civil rights struggle in the 1960s and ended with his assassination. There are white people who don’t want a Black man to lead them. They won’t say that, of course. To admit this would generate accusations of racism. And perhaps some of those who have been smearing Obama genuinely see themselves as performing a service to the country by pointing out the candidate’s alleged weaknesses.

There is no doubt that Hillary Clinton is a formidable candidate who brings much to the table and might make a credible president. But there is also no doubt that she and her supporters have helped turn the campaign into Sherman’s March to the Sea, a scorched earth, take-no-prisoner battle to the death. Is Hillary responsible for the unseemly media spectacle that has played itself out over the past four days in which Jeremiah Wright has unburdened himself of so many astonishing (at least to whites) prejudicial notions? Is she responsible for Obama’s chastened speech today in which he renounced his former minister? No, she and her surrogates are not responsible for this proximate event. But they are responsible for much that led up to it. For there would be no controversy–or at least it would be a different level of intensity–if she hadn’t tried to turn it into Obama’s defining “character moment.”

In the Jewish community, the mud has been slung fast and furiously for months now. The latest comes from a major leader in the Los Angeles Jewish community who is a Clinton “bundler” (in the words of Variety’s political blog), Daphna Ziman. She attended a fundraising event addressed by the local director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (and also a black minister). Ziman accused the minister of blaming Jews for the negative portrayal of blacks in Hollywood films. In a subsequent e mail sent to 50,000 of her “closest” Jewish confidants by way of the mailing list of the pro-Israel group, Stand With Us, Ziman called him an anti-Semite and linked him to Rev. Wright. In a separate e-mail, she claimed that Obama’s “movement is out to destroy us [Jews].” This incident was further amplified by the right-wing online news outlet, Pajamas Media and the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Clinton’s campaign hasn’t said a word about Ziman’s outburst (which wasn’t the first time she expressed what I call Jewish Obamaphobia). When the Clinton campaign winks at such hysteria, aided and abetted by Republican groups and conservative media outlets, it makes you wonder just whose side is she on (and just who is on her side)?

I’m astonished that hardly anyone in the U.S. media is asking the question: why is Barack Obama responsible for his minister’s statements or views? Why is Obama a lesser human being or candidate because the leader of the church he belonged to says things others find objectionable? Obama opponents respond by claiming that Obama has identified so closely with Wright that it is legitimate to question whether the former holds the same views as the latter. As Obama correctly noted, Wright is (or now “was”) his minster, not his political advisor. Does anyone seriously believe that Obama will pursue an AIDS policy based on Wright’s views that the U.S. government had the capacity to spread the scourge in the black community? Or that Obama’s policies toward terrorism will be guided by Wright’s views that U.S. terrorism justifies Al Qaeda terrorism against U.S. targets?

You’d have to be a certified paranoiac to believe such things. And it’s the tragedy of this electoral season that many Americans appear to do so.

Since we’re examining the views of Obama’s minister, why doesn’t anyone vet the statements of Hillary Clinton’s or John McCain’s ministers? More importantly, why doesn’t John McCain have to explain the support provided to him by evangelical super-Israel-patriot, John Hagee, who believes Israel and the U.S. should attack Iran; not to mention he hates the Catholic Church (the “Great Whore”) and predicts two-thirds of Jews will be killed in the End Times. I have read many of Hagee’s more outrageous ideas and he’s at least as nutty as Wright, if not more so. Yet McCain hasn’t paid any price.

There is yet another dimension to this tragedy. Barack Obama is an African-American candidate at the heart of whose appeal lies an ability to crossover and engage white, and all voters. His rhetoric is inclusive in a way that no previous African-American candidate’s has been. He doesn’t speak to separate Democratic constituencies or ethnic groups. He almost transcends them. At least, he did until this mess happened.

What Obama’s opponents have done is drag him down into the mud with them. They’ve said: “Not so fast buddy. You think you’re so high and mighty. You think you’re better than us. Well, we’ll teach you a thing or two about American politics. We’ll make you as small as all the rest of us.”

An American presidential candidate usually starts a career by appealing to a particular constituency. In Obama’s case it was the multiracial Chicago community which he represented in the state senate. He has tried to stay true to his African-American roots and constituents during this campaign because otherwise he would lose an important measure of authenticity.

What the Wright debacle has done though, is to threaten to unmoor Obama from his natural constituency. The candidate faces the prospect of not only alienating white voters for allegedly consorting with Wright; he may lose black support by abandoning Wright. You’re damned if you and damned if you don’t.

This is the lonely night of the soul that every presidential candidate faces and dreads. The moment when the fates seem to have turned their backs; when everything you thought was true and right and that motivated you to run is in doubt. I don’t know what the outcome will be. But Obama’s campaign is at a critical juncture. He could still win the nomination or it could just slip away from him. And even if he wins the nomination, these orchestrated attacks may conceivably have irreparably wounded him as a viable candidate in the general election.

If Hillary Clinton thinks she’s going to reap any benefit from all this she may be in for a rude shock. If Obama melts down as a candidate and she wins the nomination, she too will be wounded; perhaps even fatally so. She will certainly have lost the support of much of the black wing of the Party as well as the liberal wing. She will have to go into the general election hoping she can carry moderate-conservative Democratic voters and persuade independents and moderate Republicans to join her. In effect, she would become a version of Joe Lieberman (not exactly a beloved politician these days). In short, I think she would be an unpersuasive and inauthentic candidate. And in her victory, she will have destroyed the candidacy of one of the most promising American politicians to come along in a generation. Not an auspicious way for her to enter a general election campaign.

A slightly different form of this post was published at Comment is Free.

tags black anti-semitism, daphna ziman, hillary-clinton, jeremiah-wright, obama, obamaphobia

I’ll let the pundits pontificate on Obama’s speech and whether he succeeded in satisfying the concerns of American voters about his religious convictions and relations with his pastor. But there are a few passages I think are particularly worth noting: in particular one that moves me and one that disturbs me.

I have taken the position that Pastor Wright’s views, extreme as a few of them may be, have no place in the presidential campaign. Those who are stirring up the issue have a decided interest in smearing Obama and destroying his candidacy and little real concern about Wright’s actual views or whether or not those views have somehow influenced Obama or might impact future policies he might pursue as president.

Other than George Bush, when have we ever witnessed a president whose political program seemed dictated by theology? I really can’t recall any. When have we ever heard a previous president or presidential candidate asked to explain or defend the views of his pastor? It’s simply never come up because Americans have been wise enough to understand that while religion is important to many of us, it would never determine policy. That’s why Obama’s statement that Wright was his pastor and not his political advisor was important.

But Obama wisely didn’t choose this path in his speech. He decided: if they’re going to make Wright the issue then I’ll accept those terms; but I won’t accept their narrow frame of addressing the issue based on a set of the pastor’s alleged extreme views. Instead, I’ll put those views in the broader context of Black experience in this country. I’ll try to make Americans understand WHY Jeremiah Wright might express bitterness toward white America. And I’ll try to do this in a way that will make Americans understand the bitterness while not expecting them to embrace it.

This is what an American politician at his best can do. This is what Bobby Kennedy did. Or Martin Luther King. They ask us to reach out from our own narrow place within American society toward other Americans who live differently than we do. It doesn’t ask us to falsely pretend we are like them. It doesn’t ask us to excuse their weaknesses. It merely asks us to try understand those who have experienced this country differently than we have–who have suffered injustices that we haven’t; who have had work less well paid; who have had less educational opportunity. This is what that blessed Lincoln phrase means: to appeal to the angels of our better nature.

Obama’s critics are appealing to the devils of our worse nature. They want you to think of what divides us. They want you to mistrust Obama. They want you to think that Wright is Farrakhan is Kahane (as one commenter here attempted to argue).

Personally, I don’t know if this speech was like JFK’s famous 1960 Houston speech in which he laid to rest the concern American voters had with his Catholic background. I hope it will serve a similar purpose. I hope that with this speech he has either won the nomination or at least put himself in a position that will eventuallly get him to that point. I don’t know. But I’d like to think so.

Here are a few of the best passages in my opinion:

The [Black] church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

This is a brilliant description of all religions and even political movements. I’ve often described Judaism and Zionism in similar terms. You can’t, unless you are uncharitable or mean-spiritied, dismiss an entire Church or religion or national movement by saying it’s all-cruel or all-ignorant or all-hateful or all-racist. Only demagogues try to do this. Religion is a constant battle between warring impulses for good or ill. It is the task of the believers to ensure that the angels of our better nature triumph in this battle. Obama has captured this so well.

Here again Obama views Wright as a personal embodiment of those contradictions:

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who…on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

My hope is that Americans reading or hearing this speech will see themselves in it. How many of us enjoy relationships with pastors, family members, co-workers or friends in which we make compromises because we feel that overall the relationship benefits us in some way? How many of us accept imperfections in these people because we realize that there is more good than bad in them? And to the Obama haters out there I ask: how many of you have found perfection in your presidential candidates or your pastors or your friends? Let he who has found such perfection cast the first stone against Obama.

In this passage, Obama captures another important issue in the attack on Wright:

For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear [of Jim Crow and segregation] have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends.

What the Wall Street Journal and John McCain want to do is penalize Jeremiah Wright for his alleged extremism. But the truth is that the latter is merely a mouthpiece for what Blacks really feel. He doesn’t stir up hatred that doesn’t exist. He merely reflects it in his sermons. He is the messenger and not the cause of the problem. So the proper response should be to confront that anger rather than dismiss it. Or as Obama says:

…The anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

If anything in this speech will help him win the presidential candidacy or election it will be this paragraph:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen - is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

This indeed IS the better angels of our nature personified in political language. As is this:

…We have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.”

There are other such passages and I urge you to read or watch the whole thing for yourself.

Now, to the one disappointing passage. We all understand that Obama has a potential Achilles Heel that the right is trying to exploit. They’re trying to insinuate that he’s soft on Israel. It won’t work because Jews aren’t as stupid as Jewish Republicans make them out to be. But it still means that Obama has to watch his right flank in the Jewish community. Which is why he said this unfortunate phrase:

…The remarks that have caused this recent firestorm…expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

The only truth in this statement is that Wright’s comments about Israel DO place overwhelming blame on Israel and U.S. policy and they don’t recognize any Palestinian culpability. And this is wrong. But Obama’s statement above runs to the opposite extreme and makes the statement that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not at all rooted in Israel’s actions. Which is an abject falsehood.

Further, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has almost nothing to do with the “hateful ideologies of radical Islam.” For the conflict is a struggle between competing national identities, and competing claims over land, and not competing religions. Religious enmity is a symptom of the problem, not the root of it. Here Obama got it wrong and not just wrong but egregiously wrong. This paragraph was written for him by an AIPAC hack or someone who’s channeling one. It doesn’t at all reflect the better angels of our nature.

tags A-More-Perfect-Union, jeremiah-wright, obama-speaks-on-race, presidential-campaign, racial-injustice