Buckeye RINO

Today I listened to Sean Hannity’s radio program while he interviewed former GOP Massachusetts Governor and former Presidential candidate Mitt Romney.  Mitt Romney was trying to weigh in on the news of Rev. Wright vis-a-vis Barack Obama.  Romney was trying to split hairs over what was religious and what was political.  He did say that religion shouldn’t enter in to the Obama candidacy equation.  OK, I’m on board with that.  He did say that we should take Obama at his word that he does not share the views of Rev. Wright.  Good, because that’s what I say, also.  So, if we take Obama at his word, why did Mitt Romney go ahead and discuss the comments of Rev. Wright?  Also, if religion shouldn’t enter the equation, why did Romney question why Obama attended the same church for 20 years?  I think Romney was trying to tiptoe carefully through the discussion, but I think he failed.  I think he skated on thin ice and fell through.  I don’t think he managed to split the hairs.  Of course, I’m clearly not in synch with Hannity on this issue, either.

Though he had suspended his campaign before Ohio voted in its primary, I cast my vote for Romney, anyway.  Can you tell I’m a little bit disappointed in Romney for not taking the high road on this?

Obama took action sooner than I thought he would.  I’m glad for that.  We should never have second-guessed Obama based on Wright and religion in the first place, since we, at the least, knew that Obama was not a brainwashed cult member, and we knew that Obama had no intention of establishing a theocracy.  I certainly don’t have expectations that churches or ministers will be politically correct.  Obama, at the outset, rejected anti-Semitism.  Obama, right off the bat, expressed a very different view of America than what Wright put forward.  Obama had every right to remain in that church, no matter what people might think of Wright.  That Obama was being judged because of Wright’s words just made no sense, when Obama’s words were different.  If there’s any evidence that someone was unduly influenced by Wright’s tirades against America, it’s Mrs. Obama.  Her not-so-glowing characterizations of America have much greater potential for attracting legitimate criticism because she speaks as an Obama surrogate, whereas, Wright never did.

Watching the pundits last night, I can see that a number of them are willing to finally put this in the rear-view mirror, and the majority of them are now drawing a line that separates Wright from Obama.

And while a few conservative pundits, like Sean Hannity and Hugh Hewitt, are just too stubborn to abandon a flawed argument, I think most conservative pundits are eager to move on to other topics.

Clinton operatives, however, are still trying to milk the anti-Wright sentiments for all they’re worth.  In particular, on Larry King, Lanny Davis, while conceding that Wright’s views are not Obama’s views, is still harping on what the whole episode reveals about Obama’s judgment.  That’s just ridiculous.  Obama said that Wright wasn’t vetted by his campaign.  Before now, I didn’t know the campaign of any candidate, anywhere in the United States, was expected to vet the pastors of the candidates to make sure they were politically correct.  If we did, Billy Graham might never have been invited to the White House by any President.  Religion is a private observance that we have no right to police, so I utterly reject the view of Lanny Davis.

However, if the criticism of Obama that’s rooted in Wright’s rhetoric continues to linger, it will take the form of the narrative that Lanny Davis puts forward about judgment.  Where Obama has truly turned the page is that I don’t think Wright will do any more damage to Obama than has already been done.  Even if Wright continues to jump into the spotlight and say more outrageous things, they will no longer shadow Obama.  Obama has cast off the shadow.

It’s clear to me that the people trying to do the most harm to Obama’s reputation aren’t Republicans.  They are Clintons.  Of course, the reputation of the Clintons is pretty bad, so that’s why they work so hard to sully the reputation of any opponent they face.  Just look at the Bill Clinton administration, where the Clintons demonized women who, in the past, had been the object of Bill’s libido.  Look at the demonization of Ken Starr.  One can even look at the demonization of House Speaker Newt Gingrich.  It’s a credit to Barack Obama that the Clintons haven’t found enough information to use against Barack in their attempts to demonize him.

Behind the scenes, I think Clinton sympathizers did the bidding of the Clintons in setting the trap for Rev. Wright at the National Press Club.  I think the Clintons seized an opportunity when they sensed that Wright loves being in the spotlight, and the more he was in the spotlight, the more he’d be robbing Obama of the spotlight, and the greater the likelihood that Wright might do serious damage to Obama.   The interview with Bill Moyers was a walk in the park for Rev. Wright, and I think it made Wright a little more cocky by the time he spoke to the NAACP.  The NAACP audience was not one that was going to be hostile toward Wright, so since that went fairly well, I think Wright was lulled into a false sense of security and an overconfidence in his own ability to play the media like it was his own violin.  I think the Clintons had a hand in extending the speaking invitation to Wright, I think Wright was emboldened to accept the invitation because of his glowing self-assessment of the two prior speaking engagements, and I think that Clinton sympathizers at the National Press Club may have been egging Wright on with applause and laughter in the hopes that Wright would become more strident and say things that were more outrageous, and it worked.  Rev. Wright lacked judgment, though, because if there is an audience that’s not going to embrace a religious perspective, it would be a room full of journalists.  Why wouldn’t Wright know that?

Obama still has a lot of work to do.  His body language during the press conference about Wright wasn’t leaderly.  He clearly was agitated.  His usual facile way with words escaped him.  Clinton will try to propagate the narrative that she’s a leader, so as Obama needs to seize the spotlight, he also needs to epitomize power and leadership going forward in order to put the Clintons behind him.  That’s the next page Obama needs to turn.

Word of Mouth contributor Bruce Batista had these unflattering things to say about Sutton’s efforts in Congress to address the worsening oil crisis.  The staff of Betty Sutton, who represents Ohio’s 13th Congressional District in our nation’s capitol, sent this response.  I think the response falls flat, and I expressed my reasons for saying so over on WoM.

Obama should have granted an exclusive interview to Fox News much sooner.

I think the Democrats should have had a Nevada pre-primary debate on Fox News.

But no. Liberals everywhere screamed that having a Democrat debate on Fox News would only legitimize the channel that they deem to be a partisan tabloid.

If there were a Democrat and a Republican debating each other, and there was a perception that Fox was biased toward the Republicans, then I can understand the fuss. But when there are only Democrats?

How would a debate on Fox have been any worse than the one hosted by MSNBC where Hillary chided Tim Russert and Brian Williams for poor question selection and for making her answer the tough questions first while giving Barack an easy time of it?

How would a debate on Fox have been any worse than the one hosted by ABC, where the Obama campaign was aghast, again, at the question selection?

Were the criticisms about question selection even valid? After all, I can tell you what Clinton and Obama have said about health care, about the economy, about the war on terror, about Afghanistan, about Iraq, about our veterans, about No Child Left Behind, about housing foreclosures, about trade, about diplomacy, about the budget, and about taxes. Plus, they have legislative records that we can use to gauge their stance on a host of other issues. So, MSNBC and ABC both asked questions designed to establish the veracity of campaign messages, probing the sincerity of campaign advertisements, fleshing out the character of the candidates, seeing if the candidates had been telling the truth–in essence holding the candidates accountable for what they had been saying. What’s the harm in that? There’s a lot of good in that. Fox News could have accomplished those feats just as easily as the other networks, plus I think Fox would have pressed the two Democrats to more clearly define their immigration positions, which is something they’ve been too squishy on for fear of alienating either Latinos or alienating blue-collar whites when they are trying to lock up both constituencies.

Fox has viewers. Fox has ratings. Fox attracts advertisers. Fox is able to pay the bills and make a profit. That’s what legitimizes Fox. Sorry, liberals.

But the main reason why I say that Obama should have done an interview with Chris Wallace much sooner is that last night, on Bill O’Reilly, I saw that Obama had won a convert in the controversy over Rev. Wright. As I’ve already said, we shouldn’t attribute Wright’s views to Obama when Obama is saying something totally different than what Wright is saying. I, frankly, don’t care much for Mr. No-Spin-Zone, because I think he is overly subjective in his approach, and suffers from momentary lapses of logic. But when he rambled through his talking points at the top of the hour, I was amazingly in agreement with O’Reilly all the way through. What happened? Chris Wallace asked Barack Obama questions about Wright, and O’Reilly watched the interview. O’Reilly concluded that Obama was “a stand-up guy.” Those were his words . . . “a stand-up guy.” I noted that the interview caused many other observers, even at other networks, like CNN where Anderson Cooper hosted a panel of pundits, were believing that Obama really does disagree with the looped Wright rhetoric. There’s not much question of that anymore. Obama’s Fox interview achieved some good.

But Obama’s not out of the woods yet.

So far, the narrative that has emerged from the debates, interviews, and speeches is that Clinton is a feisty liar (Bosnia is but one illustration), while Barack is a transparent wimp. The transparency is a good thing. That’s what I like about Obama. But what Obama has to do now is to take the Democrat party by storm. He has to prove he’s a stronger, more powerful leader, and that as feisty a fighter as Clinton portrays herself to be, he has to show that he is the one who commands.

I realized last night that this Reverend Wright distraction will not go away until Obama, himself, pushes it away. Wright has begun making a flurry of appearances, heightening his notoriety, and sucking up all the oxygen in the room. Wright is clearly relishing the spotlight and is not going to relinquish it. Obama can’t afford to wait until this media frenzy over Wright dies down before getting the media to cover his candidacy on his terms again. Obama is already projected to lose Indiana.

I think what Obama needs to do is treat Wright as if he were Clinton or McCain in his speeches. Obama has said he won’t disown Wright, but he can still ridicule some of Wright’s rhetoric. After all, Obama says that he is a friend of Clinton, and that his supporters would embrace Clinton if she were the nominee, but that doesn’t stop him from ridiculing Clinton as an Annie Oakley wannabe. It didn’t stop Obama from ridiculing Clinton for hinting that the person in first place could accept the VP slot while the 2nd place person takes the C-in-C slot in order to unify the party. Obama says he respects McCain, but he’s given McCain a new first name–it’s not John anymore, it’s Bush. He can still maintain publicly that he feels friendship and respect for Wright while ridiculing Wright with wickedly funny barbs that mock the looped rhetoric. I think, if he does that, and people laugh are entertained by Obama’s repudiation of Wright’s rhetoric, Obama will have upstaged Wright, will have stolen the spotlight back from Wright, and can resume broadcasting a campaign message again. There are harsher, more dramatic steps Obama can take, too, and he should try them if this smoother approach doesn’t work, because he can’t allow Wright’s grandstanding to deny him the nomination. If he doesn’t act, not only will he lose primaries after Indiana’s, but he will fail to be acknowledged as a leader, and that could possibly lead to either a Clinton stealing the nomination, or McCain blowing him out in November.

Perhaps he could make an appearance on Hannity and Colmes and deliver his barbs while deflating Hannity at the same time. I’d like very much for Hannity to move off the Reverend Wright topic and move back to the substantive issues, perhaps expounding upon why raising taxes, even if on the “rich,” is the wrong approach to a mired economy. I think America needs to have a more sophisticated knowledge of the economy and taxes, but we won’t cross that bridge while we’re standing still jabbering about Rev. Wright.

If a Democrat is going to run as an inclusive unifier, someone who will be everyone’s president, then that Democrat needs to appear on Fox. If a Democrat is going to show that they are a strong leader that can weather the storms, then they need to appear on Fox, wear the storms are brewing. When a Democrat is going to exemplify audacity, then that Democrat needs to have the audacity to appear on Fox.