Christopher Hitchens asks an interesting question that we haven’t heard asked by the media:

What can it be that has kept Obama in Wright’s pews, and at Wright’s mercy, for so long and at such a heavy cost to his aspirations? Even if he pulls off a mathematical nomination victory, he has completely lost the first, fine, careless rapture of a post-racial and post-resentment political movement and mired us again in all the old rubbish that predates Dr. King. What a sad thing to behold. And how come? I think we can exclude any covert sympathy on Obama’s part for Wright’s views or style—he has proved time and again that he is not like that, and even his own little nods to “Minister” Farrakhan can probably be excused as a silly form of Chicago South Side political etiquette. All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?

This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it. (One can picture Obama looking pained and sensitive and saying, “Keep my wife out of it,” or words to that effect, as Clinton tried to do in 1992 when Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader quite correctly inquired about his spouse’s influence.) If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company—and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable—then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.

I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama’s 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be “read” at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn’t written in any known language. Anyway, at quite an early stage in the text, Michelle Obama announces that she’s much influenced by the definition of black “separationism” offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 screed Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America.

It’s an interesting question. Politicians and media figures both earn their livings through popularity contests, and it is intriguing that Obama’s judgment failed where Oprah Winfrey’s did not. As Newsweek reported: “Winfrey was never comfortable with the tone of Wright’s more incendiary sermons, which she knew had the power to damage her standing as America’s favorite daytime talk-show host…’She’s always been aware that her audience is very mainstream, and doing anything to offend them just wouldn’t be smart. She’s been around black churches all her life, so Reverend Wright’s anger-filled message didn’t surprise her. But it just wasn’t what she was looking for in a church’.” It’s still a puzzle why the Obama family didn’t come to the same conclusion much sooner.

Final point: it is fervently to be hoped that Frank Rich, and those who think like him, keep trying to bring up the faulty parallelism of Jeremiah Wright and this fellow Hagee. It won’t hurt Senator McCain, in our opinion, and it provides yet another excuse for Pastor Wright to make a spectacle of himself, as if he needed one.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Democrats, MSM, Republicans, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.