Has Obama lost his message?

Great Debates
121

Intertwined is not the same thing that Kozmik (and you?) are claiming.

For example, Obama was asked a direct question regarding Liberation Theology and, by his answer, it was clear that he had no clue what the phrase meant or that it had a specific identification with a particular movement. I have no trouble accepting that, of the two primary aspects of Liberation Theology, Obama heard (and Wright actually preached), the need for persons to stand up and assert their rights and to take the initiative to be responsible for themselves while he did not hear, (and Wright rarely preached), the aspect of Liberation Theology that involves condemning the system and calling for its overthrow. In a church in South Chicago that was attempting to build community, there would have been a greater need to emphasize the former, encouraging people to invest responsibility in their own lives and exhorting them to make their own opportunities. The calls for revolution have more to do with stepping outside the community and looking for like-minded individuals with whom to join or getting in the face of the establishment and demanding that it change.

I get the impression that most of the people who are making a big deal that they cannot believe that Obama did not know the darker side of Wright’s message really don’t have much association with churches.
I knew a priest for 32 years before I discovered that he was a raging homophobe. Our views were (still are) very close in terms of all the normal daily stuff that goes on around the church–prayer, liturgy, scripture, service to others, church hierarchy, and other issues. Sexual responsibility in a Christian environment was discussed, but pretty much always in the context of heterosexual relations. Off and on, over the years, he had made the occasional crack about gays or “queers,” but given the time when he grew up and his brand of humor, those comments did not strike me as indicative of anything more than an older guy who (like much of his cohort) was uncomfortable with the topic of homosexuality and used humor to keep it away. Then a discussion arose in the church about an outreach program that was going to include the GLBT community and he went nuts. In retrospect, his various shots at gays did indicate a serious issue, but since it was not a topic that came up frequently, I totally missed it.

Has Obama probably understated the amount of revolutionary language that bled into Wright’s conversations that he ignored? Possibly. Given the outraged reaction from people who don’t know enough of the issue to understand any of it, I can accept that Obabm is not going to rush out and claim that he knew every aspect of Wright’s theology from long ago.
But I suspect that Obama really did not understand the depth and range of Wright’s beliefs on the topic. There are so many areas of discussion in which one’s spiritual life overlaps with one’s life outside the church that I am not in any way surprised to find that in 20 years of sporadic conversations, that aspect of Liberation Theology never bubbled to the surface.
And I have no trouble believing that Wright only rarely spoke on the revlutionary aspect of Liberation Theology from the pulpit. Making those speeches is preaching to the choir. In my entire life I have only heard two homilies addressing birth control and I have never heard a homily addressing homosexuality. Everyone pretty much knows the church position on those topics and priests often just don’t bother getting into them.

As to Obama’s claims that Wright has changed: why would they not be true? Do you know anyone who is the same person today that they were twenty years ago? Wright could easily have become more radicalized (particularly under the current Presidency and the previous Congresses) just as Obama was spending far more time outside Chicago and, later, Illinois.

Until someone demonstrates that Obama was embracing the revolutionary aspect of Liberation Theology twenty or ten years ago and is now hiding it or provides evidence that Obama’s personal approach to either spiritual or political ideas have changed, a claim that Obama has “lost” his message with no evidence that his message has changed is simply political rhetoric.

There are any number of legitimate issues that I have seen pointed at Obama, but this thread is not among them.

122

Know what? It doesn’t matter.

Obama’s “message” is the one that gets received, not the one that gets communicated. He, and his supporters, can talk all they want to about how he doesn’t believe the same things as Wright, and it just doesn’t matter to how many votes he gets, either in the remaining primaries or in November.

In politics, *perception * is reality. Fairness and factuality just don’t affect elections except as they indirectly influence those perceptions. The perception of Obama has taken a hit. To keep it from being fatal, he has to perform damage control on that perception. He looks to a strong majority like he’s throwing an old friend overboard for the sake of expediency, as the few polls on the subject confirm, and that makes the perception of him include expediency as well as sympathy for black radicalism. Therefore that, politically, is reality for him today. That’s what he has to fix or else he’s got a one-way ticket to Dukakisville or even closer.
Just ftr, I do have some close personal experience with liberation theology and the preachers who expound it. I simply cannot believe that it either never came up in Wright’s sermons or private discussions over 20 years or that someone of Obama’s obvious wide knowledge of the world would not know what it is.

123

I already addressed this point earlier when I pointed out that Obama has a PR problem. However, that was not the attempted point of this thread and indicating that the OP was poorly conceived is still a legitimate point.

I know people who are very active in the RCC and who hung on every word issued by JP II or by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger during the period when the South American Liberation Theologians were being subjected to scrutiny who still really don’t know what the theology entailed. It is not that difficult to throw out the catchphrase “Liberation Theology” without appending a discourse on its antecedents, principles, and praxis. There is a lot of Liberation Theology that is probably preached every week at Wright’s (or Moss’s) church that never sets forth theological principles in the manner of Paul Tillich or wanders near the issue of revolution and does not require that condemnations of the racist forces in U.S. society equate the entirety of the U.S. to the KKK. (And, as I filtered the jokes of my homophobic priest acquaintance because homophobia did not strike me as consistent with the rest of his actions and personality, such language in the middle of a fiery sermon could have been filtered by Obama as merely rhetorical flourishes.)
If you need to imply that Obama just has to be dishonest in his statements, either dig up genuine evidence or go back and insert it into one of the many "is “too/is not” personality threads among the various Obama/Clinton partisans.

124

If you insist that it’s plausible he’s simply as uninformed or incurious as the average parishioner, you’re welcome to. I for one think he deserves a little more credit than that.

125

This is a bullshit response based on you attempting to decide what he did or did not know with no evidence, either way.
Got evidence?

126

Yes, perception is reality. From the headline in The New York Times - In Poll, Obama Survives Furor, but Fall Is the Test - this was what I’ve been saying all along.

127

There’s a lot of stuff in that article, so I don’t know what you were referring to. Was it this:

128

As far as I can tell, that headline is based one of those slippery poll questions where they ask people what they think about what other people think. In other words, people are responding overall- “I don’t have a problem with Wright in the fall, but others probably will.”

Those don’t quite wash with me.

Compare:


46. If Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, how much will the 
Reverend Wright issue matter to you in deciding who to vote for in November - 
a lot, some, not much or not at all?

A lot | Some | Not much | Not at all | DK/NA
5/1-3/08* 11 13 16 57 3
DPV* 9 14 12 63 1

47. What about most people you know? If Barack Obama is the Democratic 
nominee, how much will the Reverend Wright issue matter to them in deciding 
who to vote for in November - a lot, some, not much or not at all?

A lot | Some | Not much | Not at all | DK/NA
5/1-3/08* 15 29 20 25 11
DPV* 18 23 20 27 11

73% of people say that it will matter “not much/not at all” to them.
However, only 45% of people say that it will matter “not much/not at all” to the people that they know.

I think this bears out the general trend that most people think that they are smarter than most of the people that they know, but I’m not sure how much we can be expected to draw from it. It’s a misleading headline drawn from the response to a bad question.

The poll is very interesting though when you read the whole thing, because it has like a page and a half on questions about Wright, and they all seem to bear out the first part of the headline, and that one shaky question is the excuse for the second part of the head. From this we can conclude that Wright sells newspapers but people are not tarring Obama with his brush.

129

Or maybe it does matter to them, but they are embarrassed to say so to a pollster. And they bring up “other people” in the way someone migh ask for advice about some “friend” he has who is having an affair…

130

Or maybe their friends are racist, and they know that. Or maybe their friends are members of trinity united who would be offended at Obama’s jettisoning of Wright. Or maybe they don’t know what the questioner could possibly be referring to but feel like they’re supposed to answer yes to this question because it’s essentially an “OK, but” question to one that they’ve already answered.

I take your point but I think these kind of subliminal poll questions are worthless because there is no way we can see the reasoning behind the answer and there are many possible lines of reasoning.

For example, I might answer that second question with a big yes, because of my long-held dual opinion that many people are idiots and I am an exalted genius.