The Discerning Texan

“The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago,” Obama said on Tuesday. Obama was “shocked” and “surprised” by the man he heard speak at the National Press Club. Wright’s words, Obama insisted, “contradicts what [I] believe so fundamentally.”

But the notion that Jeremiah Wright is a fundamentally different person now than he was just a few years ago seems extremely implausible. Wright is, after all, a person who long ago embraced the “black liberation theology” of James Cone. Wright is a man who traveled to Libya in the 1980s with Louis Farrakhan and met with Muammar Qaddafi. Wright was instrumental in honoring Farrakhan a few years ago and praised him as a great figure. Wright has used his “Pastor’s Corner” in the Trinity United Church bulletin to reprint pieces by a leading Hamas figure. And Obama was concerned enough about what Wright had said in the past that he disinvited Wright from playing a role when Obama announced he was running for president. It’s also worth recalling that in a New York Times story last year on Wright and Obama, Wright indicated that the two had spoken and agreed that if Obama ever got the nomination, the senator would have to distance himself from Wright. How prescient. This all makes Obama’s claim that the Wright on display on Monday was something wholly new and offensive to Obama difficult to accept.

Sen. Obama himself, in his much-praised race speech in Philadelphia, tried to leave himself an escape hatch when he — in a shift — conceded that he knew Wright to be “an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy.” Obama said that he in fact heard “controversial” comments by Wright while he sat in church and “strongly disagree[d] with many of [Wright’s] political views.” But Obama never told us specifically what he heard that qualified as “controversial” and qualified Wright as a “fierce critic” of the U.S. government — and an unusually passive media never asked. But one got the distinct impression that Wright’s National Press Club speech Monday was no maiden voyage.

Barack Obama is in treacherous territory. He is now in a very visible and increasingly ugly fight with a man who was an intimate friend and who on Monday showed he is both beyond the control of the Obama campaign and willing to go after Obama’s character. From all we can tell about Wright, this fire probably hasn’t burned itself out just yet.

A few months ago, Barack Obama, a very likable man in possession of some tremendous talents, was soaring high above the political seas. He now looks to be heading directly for the cliffs. It isn’t a pleasant thing to watch. But it appears to be something he has brought on himself.