Wright's Jeremiads

Bill Moyers did his best last night on PBS to put Barack Obama's controversial pastor into perspective. He succeeded in showing the man's brilliance but created unease in an observer who, by taste and temperament, is not attracted to apocalyptic preaching about the human condition.

From the interview, it's easy to see what Obama found in Jeremiah Wright and his church that gave a new dimension to his secular desire to help the poor and dispossessed during his early days in Chicago.

Wright's church apparently did and does good work in uplifting its community, but the social benefits come with a moral price--the preacher's selective view of good and evil in the political world.

Consider Wright's use of Martin Luther King to justify his own history. "Dr. King, of course, was vilified," he told Moyers, asserting that, after King talked about racism, militarism and capitalism, he was "ostracized not only by the majority of Americans in the press; he got vilified by his own community. They thought he had overstepped his bounds...He was vilified by all of the Negro leaders who felt he'd overstepped his bounds talking about an unjust war."

Martin Luther King's opposition to the war made him unpopular with Lyndon Johnson but not the rest of America, least of all African-Americans and, unlike Wright, he did not use it to condemn all of American history, from the mistreatment of Native Americans to plotting drug addiction in black communities.

The Rev. Wright's need to "damn" America leads him to a peculiar view of history. He goes back centuries to mine our national past for evil but, when asked about Louis Farrakhan's racist and anti-Semitic speech, dismisses it with "That was twenty years ago" and praises him for getting African-Americans off drugs and giving them self-respect.

Perhaps most troubling of all is his smiling intimation that Barack Obama is only distancing himself from his views for political expedience: "(W)hat happened in Philadelphia where he had to respond to the sound bites, he responded as a politician. But he did not disown me because I'm a pastor."

A Living Rebuke to Today's Politics

You might sum up what's wrong with this process of picking a president in two words: Joe Biden. Why is he stuck in single digits?

In an interview with Judy Woodruff on PBS' News Hour last night, Biden was a reminder of the kind of candidate that old-fashioned, smoke-filled-room politics of the past century would often produce: experienced, knowing, comfortable in his own skin, someone to be trusted without being idealized.

Not always. There was Nixon, of course, but there were also FDR, Jack Kennedy, Eisenhower, Adlai Stevenson and even Truman, if you overlook the cronyism.

Biden is a throwback to those days in refusing to play the Hillary-Rudy-Romney game of pandering from the heart. In Iowa, he is running a tongue-in-cheek ad about the phrase often heard in Democratic debates, "Joe's right," and he has been--about Iraq (after trusting Bush in 2002) and most domestic issues based on more than half a lifetime in Congress.

Peace to those cynics who will pop up with "plagiarism" and "shoot from the hip," but Biden seems to have learned from past mistakes and personal losses to emerge not sadder but wiser and optimistic. He deserves a closer look.

The old pols who used to pick candidates were a nasty, often crooked, lot, but they were realists who didn't fall for sound bites, test-panel slogans and shifty commercials. Nobody wants them back, but there must be a better alternative than this.

Maybe the YouTubers tonight will show us the way.

War Stories

Here is a scene that won’t be part of Ken Burns’ new series about World War II on PBS this week.

In 1945, a 20-year-old foot soldier arrives at General Patton’s Third Army in France. Before being sent to a rifle company, he is assigned to stay up every night and on the battalion’s only typewriter, which is not available during the day, copy officers’ notes about suspected SIWs, Self-Inflicted Wounds.

Night after night, under a Coleman lantern hissing yellow light with sounds of battle in the background, he taps out stories in quadruplicate about young men who have maimed themselves out of fear and fatigue, offering up some body part to save the rest--shooting an arm or leg, slashing a thigh, dislocating a shoulder or wrenching a knee in some improbable fall.

Fighting a war, the stories reveal, is like everything else that is important in life, a matter of showing up, doing what has to be done and not running away, and there is a thin line between those who can do it and those who can’t.

Later on and further away, there will be talk of heroes and greatest generations and abstractions about defending ideals. For those who fight wars, it’s as simple as being there and staying.

The more complicated questions have to be answered by those who send and keep them there.

Republican President? Liar Luntz Has a Plan

Talk about die-hards: The GOP’s piss-on–the-public pollster/pundit Frank Lunz unveils his strategy to keep the White House in ’08. It gets a tad twisty, of course, so follow closely:

Play the “fed up with Washington” card: “Democrats blew into Washington in 2006 as a breath of fresh air in response to Republican scandal, Republican budget mismanagement and a Republican war. But in recent weeks, that freshness has turned stale.”

Sell the voters hope: Luntz says focus groups have been saying, "Don't tell us what George W. Bush did wrong. Tell us what you will do right. Don't talk about the past. Tell us about the future."

Be authentic, even if you have to fake it: Don’t try to “recapture a mood that has long since gone by...the Republican candidate should seek to lead like Reagan, not be Reagan.”

Win Ohio: Give them “a culturally conservative message fused with government accountability and economic opportunity specifically tailored to voters in the industrial heartland.”

Luntz, whose specialty is inverting the truth (“global warming” to “climate change”), is bamboozling himself now into forgetting that he has been discredited to the point that PBS last month, after hiring him as an analyst for a Democratic debate, had to pull back under fire.

A long-time liar for Rudy Giuliani, Luntz has no official place in this campaign. But he no doubt is in a closet somewhere, churning out truthful lies to make America’s Mayor look Reaganesque but not like Reagan, devising a culturally conservative message for his cross-dressing candidate and floating pipe-dream plans for how the Republicans can hold on to the White House with even bigger lies than Bush and Cheney could invent.

Debating by the Book

Disingenuousness is always in the air at Presidential debates, but tonight’s Democratic do promises some new wrinkles.

For a start, the network announcement makes it sound like a book promotion: “Inspired by the book The Covenant with Black America, the All-American Presidential Forums on PBS marks the first time that a panel comprised of journalists of color will be represented in primetime. Many of the questions that will be asked of the candidates focus on key domestic priorities that were originally outlined in the book.”

The moderator will be Tavis Smiley, a talk show host who edited the best-seller. “Immediate public feedback on the performance of the candidates,” PBS notes, “will be conducted by noted pollster Frank Luntz.” Some Democrats would describe Luntz more accurately as a Republican hack who twists words to deceive voters.

In this setting, the candidates will be tempted to sell the sincerity of their concern for African American voters. The real test will be how well they restrain the intensity of their puckering up and address issues in realistic terms that won’t insult the intelligence of their audience.