Obama took too long to denounce Wright
What took Barack Obama so long? Yes, the "old uncle who says things I don't always agree with" is no longer welcome for dinner. That was the Illinois senator's urgently delivered message about his fiery former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom he had previously denounced but not, until Tuesday, disowned.
What the presidential candidate from Chicago had to say was strongly worded, solemn and angry. It was powerful and personal. But it still raises the question of his response time. In political terms, this was a 3 a.m. phone call that went into voice mail.
Wright for four long days had been back in the headlines. In a PBS interview with Bill Moyers on Friday, he essentially dismissed Obama as a posturing "politician," somebody who says what he has to say to get elected. Then Sunday in Detroit, before 10,000 members of the NAACP, Wright did it again. Even the reverend's good words about Obama didn't do the candidate any favors as Wright chanted, "Barack HUSSEIN Obama, Barack HUSSEIN Obama, Barack HUSSEIN Obama" ostensibly to mimic those "stuck on stupid" types who emphasize the candidate's Arabic middle name "to scare folk." Why Wright would then provide his own emphasis is anybody's guess.
But Monday at the National Press Club in Washington was the worst, a combination of overarching narcissism peppered with sarcastic smackdowns. Wright, who is a certifiably brilliant scholar and speaker, chose instead to be the bully in the pulpit.
And he essentially reaffirmed all those scurrilous "sound bites" extracted from his sermons, statements about government's role in promulgating the AIDS epidemic, about the greatness of Minister Louis Farrakhan and about how criticism of Wright constitutes an attack on the entire black church in America.
Wright commanded center stage when his former parishioner needed it most. Obama's winning campaign game has been hobbled by Hillary Clinton's victory in Pennsylvania and by his own missteps with blue-collar voters. Indiana and North Carolina's primaries are around the corner. When there's a fire in your bedroom, do you wait to see it reach the kids' rooms before you put it out?
Obama waited.
Hours after Wright lobbed his last grenades Monday in Washington, the senator was questioned by reporters on a tarmac in Wilmington, N.C. And he still had nothing new to say, just what he'd said before, that some of Wright's comments "offend me, and I understand why they have offended the American people."
On Tuesday, after Obama's stinging denunciation of Wright, a reporter asked why he couldn't have said all of that on the tarmac?
Because, said the candidate, he "hadn't seen it."
Memo to staff: Please keep presidential hopeful posted.
This isn't the first time the campaign has waited out a problem, declining to take a controversy by the horns.
It took a relentless chorus of Chicago media almost a year to finally get Obama and his people to deliver long-asked-for documents and answer what were, at best, incompletely answered questions about his former friend and now-indicted fund-raiser, Tony Rezko. He finally did so in March.
There are judgment questions, fair ones, to be asked about Obama's past dealings with controversial people.
On Tuesday, his answers about Wright were filled with a purpose and passion that seemed to have been lacking lately.
But what those answers have yet to resolve is the matter of decisiveness, of acting quickly, speaking forcefully, and perhaps not waiting for overnight polling numbers or a full-blown disaster, to decide the next day's course.
