2008 Election
Reverend Wright, Campaigns
Reverend
Wright Controversy
In
early March, news organizations and websites showed video recordings
of some controversial sermons by Obama’s pastor, Reverend Jeremiah
Wright, including one in which Wright blamed the United States for
the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and
Washington and another in which he accused the federal government of
“inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of
color.” Obama largely defused the crisis by giving a speech in
Philadelphia on March 18, 2008, repudiating Wright's statements and
thoughtfully outlining his own views on race relations (Nelson
1).
March
13, 2008— -- Sen. Barack Obama's pastor says blacks should not sing
"God Bless America" but "God damn America."
The Rev.
Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor for the last 20 years at the Trinity
United Church of Christ on Chicago's south side, has a long history
of what even Obama's campaign aides concede is "inflammatory
rhetoric," including the assertion that the United States
brought on the 9/11 attacks with its own "terrorism."
…
Rev.
Wright married Obama and his wife Michelle, baptized their two
daughters and is credited by Obama for the title of his book, "The
Audacity of Hope."
An ABC
News review of dozens of Rev. Wright's sermons, offered for sale by
the church, found repeated denunciations of the U.S. based on what he
described as his reading of the Gospels and the treatment of black
Americans.
"The
government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a
three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No,
no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent
people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for
treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as
long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."
In
addition to damning America, he told his congregation on the Sunday
after Sept. 11, 2001, that the United States had brought on al
Qaeda's attacks because of its own terrorism.
"We
bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the
thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,"
Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.
"We
have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black
South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have
done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards.
America's chickens are coming home to roost," he told his
congregation.
Sen.
Obama told the New York Times he was not at the church on the
day of Rev. Wright's 9/11 sermon. "The violence of 9/11 was
inexcusable and without justification," Obama said in a recent
interview. "It sounds like he was trying to be provocative,"
Obama told the paper.
…
In
a statement to ABCNews.com, Obama's press spokesman Bill Burton said,
"Sen. Obama has said repeatedly that personal attacks such as
this have no place in this campaign or our politics, whether they're
offered from a platform at a rally or the pulpit of a church. Sen.
Obama does not think of the pastor of his church in political terms.
Like a member of his family, there are things he says with which Sen.
Obama deeply disagrees. But now that he is retired, that doesn't
detract from Sen. Obama's affection for Rev. Wright or his
appreciation for the good works he has done" (Ross
and El-Buri 1-3).
Democratic
presidential candidate Barack
Obama
said
Tuesday he was outraged by the latest divisive comments from his
former pastor and rejected the notion that he secretly agrees with
him.
Obama
is seeking to tamp down the growing fury over Rev. Jeremiah Wright
and his incendiary remarks that threaten to undermine his campaign at
a tough time. The Illinois senator is coming off a loss in
Pennsylvania to rival Hillary Rodham Clinton and trying to win over
white working-class voters in Indiana and North Carolina in next
Tuesday's primaries.
"I
am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened by the
spectacle that we saw yesterday," Obama told reporters at a news
conference.
After
weeks of staying out of the public eye while critics lambasted his
sermons, Wright made three public appearances in four days to defend
himself. The former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in
Chicago has been combative, providing colorful commentary and feeding
the story Obama had hoped was dying down.
On Monday,
Wright criticized the U.S. government as imperialist and stood by his
suggestion that the United States invented the HIV virus as a means
of genocide against minorities.
"Based on
this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans
in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing
anything," he said.
…
"If
Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected,"
Wright said. "Politicians say what they say and do what they do
based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls."
…
"What
became clear to me is that he was presenting a world view that
contradicts who I am and what I stand for," Obama said. "And
what I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that
my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political
posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I'm about
knows that I am about trying to bridge gaps and I see the commonality
in all people."
In a highly
publicized speech last month, Obama sharply condemned Wright's
remarks. But he did not leave the church or repudiate the minister
himself, who he said was like a family member.
On
Tuesday, Obama sought to distance himself further from Wright.
"I
have been a member of Trinity United Church of Christ since 1992, and
have known Reverend Wright for 20 years," Obama said. "The
person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago."
…
Obama said he
didn't vet his pastor before deciding to seek the presidency. He said
he was particularly distressed that the furor has been a distraction
to the purpose of a campaign.
"I gave him
the benefit of the doubt in my speech in Philadelphia explaining that
he's done enormous good. ... But when he states and then amplifies
such ridiculous propositions as the U.S. government somehow being
involved in AIDS. ... There are no excuses. They offended me. They
rightly offend all Americans and they should be denounced"
(Associated 1-3).
Campaigns
after the Conventions Begin
More
than two dozen Republican staffers were camped in Denver last week,
spearheading the latest assaults on Barack Obama who was addressing
the Democratic convention nearby. 'We came here to piss the Democrats
off,' said one Republican aide with a grin.
They
have largely succeeded. Each day new adverts have hammered a
relentless drumbeat of negativity, painting Obama as too liberal, too
inexperienced and practically a danger to America's future. Leading
lights of the Republican universe have paraded in front of the
cameras in a disciplined display of party message-making. A typical
performance came from former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. 'There are
still a lot of serious questions about Barack Obama's preparedness to
lead the country,' Giuliani said, …The
ad attacked Obama as being so ignorant of foreign affairs that he was
virtually a security threat himself. It touched on scare issues such
as Islamic terrorism and Iranian nukes. Then it represented Obama's
positions on national security as naive and weak. 'These are contrast
ads,' Giuliani said afterwards. 'And both sides do them.'
That
is only half-true. Democrats do launch attack ads and campaign
negatively but no one does it like the Republican Party. Under a
succession of dark geniuses, the party has perfected the black art of
negative campaigning. It has created the most effective attack
machine in the Western world, with the sole purpose of destroying
opponents and winning elections. For opponents it is a source of
shock, misery and more than a little envy. Its tentacles stretch from
the McCain campaign into the murky corners of talk radio, the
internet and shadowy groups willing to use any outlandish smear.
Now
that machine is focused with laser-like intensity on Obama. The
clamour is loud and shrill: Obama is vain, inexperienced, liberal and
dangerous. It is backed by a clandestine chorus whispering that he
has a secretive Islamic past and it uses racially loaded language. It
is also only going to get louder. This week, as McCain and the
Republicans gather for their party convention in the Minnesota city
of St Paul, the noise will become deafening. It has one purpose - to
keep the White House in Republican hands at all costs and against the
odds.
The
current mastermind of the Republican attack machine is known as the
Bullet. He is Steve Schmidt, a protégé of Bush's guru, Karl Rove.
Nicknamed for his results as much as his bald head, he made his name
as commander of the war room that wiped out Democrat John Kerry in
2004. Brought in to shake things up in July, Schmidt imposed
discipline on a disorganised campaign. He dissuaded McCain from his
off-the-cuff chats with reporters, and honed the lesson of repeating
simple messages loudly and often. Ads attack Obama as a 'celebrity'
or a faux-messiah. By doing so they hope to turn Obama's greatest
strength - his ability to inspire - into a fatal flaw. That is backed
up by another line: that Obama is simply not fit to be president.
...
The
campaign will happily twist words. In the ad that Giuliani showed,
Obama was hit for referring to the 'tiny' threat from a nuclear Iran.
In reality Obama had been pointing out that the problem of Iran was
'... tiny compared to the Soviet Union'. Others have interspersed
footage of the Democrat candidate with images of Britney Spears. One
jokey advert painted him as a Moses-type figure capable of parting
the Red Sea. Mocking his message of 'hope' and 'change', radio host
Rush Limbaugh has taken to referring on-air to Obama as simply 'the
Messiah'.
…
Schmidt
and his public operations are merely the visible tip of the machine.
But the most aggressive ads are not made by the McCain campaign. They
are made by so-called '527 groups' - named for a clause in the tax
laws - that cannot officially be linked to any campaign. They are
privately financed and exist outside the campaigns, like some sort of
'black ops' off the CIA budget. Democrats have been helped by 527
groups too, though Obama has tried to clamp down on their activities.
But Republicans have found them to be highly effective. The Swift
Boat campaign that raised questions about Kerry's Vietnam service in
the 2004 campaign was a 527. It was financed largely by Texan
billionaire Harold Simmons. Simmons has now donated £1.5m to a 527
group called the American Issues Project. The AIP last week brought
out the most negative ad in the campaign so far. It linked Obama to
Bill Ayers, a former radical with the Weather Underground
Organisation, which planted bombs in the 1960s. Ayers, now an
academic, once sat on the board of an anti-poverty group alongside
Obama and they have other minor connections. The ad, however, used
the imagery of 9/11 to paint Obama as being friends with terrorists.
Many more AIP ads will be in the works.
It’s
not just the 527s. There is an industry devoted to publishing
anti-Obama screeds. The most popular has been The
Obama Nation,
by conservative polemicist Jerome Corsi. The book paints a radical
picture of Obama as having a secret Islamic past - but critics say
the book can be proven to be wrong. Corsi has also called for Obama
to take a drugs test and warned that he might create a 'department of
hate crimes' if elected. The
Obama Nation
has been a bestseller, relentlessly promoted by sympathetic media
figures such as Fox News's conservative host Sean Hannity. On his
show, Hannity allowed Corsi to claim Obama wanted to allow women to
have 'abortions' even after their child was born. Instead of refuting
the ridiculous claim, Hannity merely expressed shock. The incident
forced a liberal media watchdog to issue an analysis showing Obama
had never actually supported the murder of newborn children.
Yet
Hannity is just one of a pantheon of conservative media figures who
echo the claims of the Republican machine and convey them to the
general public in their millions. They include TV hosts such as Glenn
Beck on CNN (who last week called Obama a 'Marxist'), Matt Drudge on
the internet and radio personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, the most
powerful single broadcaster in America with an estimated 20 million
listeners a week on 600 stations. Limbaugh frequently paints Obama as
benefiting from 'affirmative action' in his political career. He also
makes frequent reference to Obama's middle name, Hussein. Both are
clumsy ways of inflaming racial and religious issues at the ballot
box (Harris 1-4).
In
his [nomination] acceptance speech on the last night of the
convention, Obama outlined the issues of his general election
campaign. Among other things, Obama promised to “cut taxes for 95
percent of all working families,” “end our dependence on oil from
the Middle East,” “invest $150 billion over the next decade in
affordable, renewable sources of energy,” provide “affordable,
accessible health care for every single American,” close “corporate
loopholes and tax havens that don't help America grow,” “end this
war in Iraq responsibly and finish the fight against al Qaida and the
Taliban in Afghanistan,” and allow “our gay and lesbian brothers
and sisters to visit the person they love in a hospital and live
lives free of discrimination.”
Obama
left Denver on August 29 enjoying a small lead over McCain in the
polls. But on that same day, McCain stole Obama's thunder by
selecting Governor Sarah T. Palin of Alaska as his running mate.
Palin balanced the Republican ticket in some obvious ways: young
rather than old (Palin was forty-four, McCain was seventy-two), a
woman rather than a man, a governor rather than a senator, and a
social conservative rather than a national security conservative. At
the same time, Palin's reform record in Alaska reinforced McCain's
longstanding image as a political “maverick” who bucked the
Washington establishment. Her rousing acceptance speech at the
convention helped to propel the Republican ticket into a small lead
over Obama and Biden in early September (Nelson 4-5).
McCain
had wanted to make an even bolder pick: his old friend Sen. Joe
Lieberman of Connecticut, who had been Vice President Al Gore's
running mate in 2000 and who had crossed party lines the year before
to campaign for McCain in New Hampshire.
Lieberman
had won his most recent Senate term as an independent. And he would
have added an unprecedented bipartisan flavor to McCain's campaign,
which had adopted the motto "Country First" to downplay
partisanship.
According
to the 2010 book "Game Change," a behind-the-scenes account
of the 2008 race by journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, a
McCain-Lieberman ticket was viewed internally as a way to break with
President George W. Bush's unpopular presidency, which was seen as
the biggest hurdle to
Republicans keeping the
White House.
It
wasn't to be. While McCain and Lieberman were simpatico on foreign
policy, that was about it. Lieberman was an unabashed liberal on most
other issues. Most problematic for McCain was Lieberman's support of
abortion rights. As speculation swirled that McCain might choose a
pro-choice running mate, conservatives were outraged. Per "Game
Change," McCain's pollster Bill McInturff tried to gauge the
potential impact and found that a McCain-Lieberman ticket would cost
more GOP votes than it would swing in independents. And that was
assuming there wouldn't be an outright revolt at the Republican
National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.
McCain
bowed to that reality and selected Palin, who made her presidential
campaign trail debut Aug. 29 in Dayton, Ohio.
Charlie
Black, a senior McCain adviser, told The
Arizona Republic
that McCain was impressed by
Palin after meeting her in February at a National Governors
Association meeting in Washington, D.C.
"What
this brings is a spirit of reform and change that is vital now in our
nation's capital," McCain said in an Aug. 31 appearance on "Fox
News Sunday."
"By
the way, in the last day and a half or whatever it's been, we have
raised $4 million on the internet. I wish I had taken her a month
ago," McCain added.
The
Palin pick was a surprise for many reasons, not the least of which
was that nobody outside Alaska, besides die-hard political junkies,
had ever heard of her. The choice also seemed to undercut McCain's
biggest strength against Obama: his long experience on the national
scene and in the military relative to Obama. Obama had tried to
counter that perception by tapping Joe Biden, a veteran senator from
Delaware who had spent years as either chairman or a senior member of
the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Now McCain's
campaign had opened itself to attacks about Palin's lack of
experience in national politics or on foreign policy. Her short
record in public office also would reveal a taste for the pork-barrel
projects that McCain for years had crusaded against as a waste of
taxpayer money.
The
first time he heard who McCain had picked, Biden asked, "Who's
Sarah Palin?" according to the account in "Game Change."
But
Palin was a folksy, intriguing newcomer to national politics and
provided some welcome contrasts to McCain.
McCain
was the epitome of the moderate GOP establishment; she was an
anti-establishment conservative. She was 44 years old; he had turned
72 on the day his Palin pick was revealed. And the initial impression
of Palin was that she seemed more down to earth than McCain, who
recently had been unable to remember how many homes he and his wife,
Cindy, owned around the country. (The answer at the time was eight,
though, technically, beer-distributionship heiress Cindy controlled
the family fortune and their finances were separate.)
There
was even speculation inside the McCain campaign that, as a woman with
five young children, Palin might appeal to some female voters who
were disappointed by Obama's defeat of Sen. Hillary Clinton of New
York in the Democratic primaries.
"John
was a maverick, and he said he had picked me because in many ways I'm
wired the same," Palin would write later in her 2009 memoir,
"Going Rogue: An American Life."
… Palin
was the big hit of the convention. She used her speech at St. Paul's
Xcel Energy Center to introduce herself to a national audience, to
stand up for her small-town roots, and take shots at Obama's past
career as a community organizer in Chicago.
"Before
I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my
hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem
to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job
involves," Palin said. "I guess a small-town mayor is sort
of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual
responsibilities."
She
also introduced "hockey mom" into the national lexicon in
her acceptance of the vice-presidential nomination. "You know
the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick,"
she said in one of her speech's most memorable lines.
…
"You
know, I've been called a maverick, someone who marches to the beat of
his own drum," McCain said of his reputation for bucking the GOP
at times. "Sometimes, it's meant as a compliment and sometimes
it's not. What it really means is I understand who I work for. I
don't work for a party. I don't work for a special interest. I don't
work for myself. I work for you."
McCain
and his team left St. Paul with a feeling the deck had been
reshuffled. and they were holding a better hand.
That
feeling wouldn't last (Nowici II 1-5).
The
24/7 news cycle and the proliferation of blogs
as a means of disseminating
information (both factual and erroneous) framed the contest as both
campaigns attempted to control the narrative. McCain’s campaign
tried to paint Obama as a naive, inexperienced political lightweight
who would sit down with the leaders of anti-American regimes in Cuba,
Iran, and Venezuela without preconditions, claimed that he was merely
a celebrity with little substance (airing an ad comparing Obama to
Britney Spears and Paris Hilton), labeled his ideas socialist
(hammering away at Obama’s tax policy in particular and pouncing on
Obama’s comment to “Joe the Plumber” that he would seek to
“spread the wealth”), and attacked
his association with Bill Ayers, who had cofounded the Weathermen, a
group that carried out bombings in the 1960s. Ayers, in 2008 a
professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago—and constantly
called an “unrepentant domestic terrorist” by the McCain
campaign—lived a few blocks from Obama in Chicago, contributed to
his reelection campaign for the Illinois Senate, and served on an
antipoverty board with Obama from 1999 to 2002. Obama downplayed his
acquaintance with Ayers and denounced Ayers’s activities as
“detestable” but was quick to
note that these activities had occurred 40 years ago when the
candidate was eight years old. In addition, on the basis of e-mails
and other assertions never proved, a small but still significant
percentage of the public erroneously believed Obama (a practicing
Christian) to be a Muslim.
To
defend against the attacks, Obama’s campaign took the unprecedented
step of establishing a Web site, “Fight the Smears,” to “fight
back against ‘hateful,’ ‘vicious,’ and ‘desperate’
robocalls and mailers.” In turn, Obama’s campaign attempted to
cast doubt on McCain’s maverick persona and diminish his appeal to
independent voters by tying him at every opportunity to Pres. George
W. Bush, whose popularity was among the
lowest of any modern president, and broadcasting ads that showed the
two in embrace and often repeating that McCain voted with the Bush
administration 90 percent of the time. The Obama campaign also sought
to frame McCain as “erratic,” a charge that was often repeated
and that some alleged was an oblique reference to McCain’s age, as
he would be the oldest person ever to be inaugurated to a first term
as president (Editors 1-2).
Works
Cited:
Associated
Press, “Obama Strongly Denounced Former Pastor.” NBC
News,
April 29, 2008. Web.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/24371827/ns/politics-decision_08/t/obama-strongly-denounces-former-pastor/#.Xt1Q5EVKi1s
Editors
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “United
States Presidential Election of 2008.”
Encyclopaedia
Britannica.
Web.
https://www.britannica.com/event/United-States-presidential-election-of-2008/Primary-Results
Harris,
Paul, “US
Election:
It's the Most
Vicious
Election
Campaign
Ever
- and Here's
Why.”
The
Guardian, August
30, 2008. Web.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/aug/31/uselections2008.barackobama
Nelson,
Michael,
“Barack
Obama: Campaigns and Elections.”
UVA Miller Center.
Web.
https://millercenter.org/president/obama/campaigns-and-elections
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