What should Obama do about Rev. Jeremiah Wright?

With the pastor's latest invective clouding Obama's campaign, Salon turns to a panel of political and cultural experts for answers.

Compiled by Salon staff

April 29, 2008 | Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center and research professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication

Here is how Barack Obama should address Wright's latest comments:

"When I announced my candidacy, I said that Americans were tired of the old politics of division and blame. In the last few days, I have reluctantly been forced to conclude that Rev. Wright's views, and the ways he expresses them, are part of the negative politics that our country needs to transcend. They were forged in our past; they sometimes played a decisive and positive role in our past, but they are not part of the positive future I see. I'm not running for president to lead America back to an era that pits interest against interest, or group against group. I want to lead America forward -- to a common ground, a higher ground. This is not the time to reopen old wounds; it's a time for healing. Rev. Wright is passionate about injustice, and so am I. Rev. Wright has the right to express himself loudly and clearly. But so do I. And anyone who confuses his message with mine fails to understand my message of hope and my promise of reconciliation."

Andrew Sullivan, author of the Daily Dish blog

I have long given a pass to Obama on Wright, because I don't believe in the politics of guilt by association and I understand the difficulty of repudiating a pastor of long standing. I do not know Wright personally but I can believe that he has qualities that would inspire Obama and others to come to Christ. I also think some leeway is valid for the mode of discourse -- prophetic Bible-thumping -- that is under discussion.

But the Press Club display on Monday changes things. It was an attack on Obama; it was divisive and bitter and racist. Embracing Farrakhan at this point was a provocation.

Wright has given Obama no choice. I believe he has to publicly and clearly and irrevocably disown him and say in words that are clear and bright that Wright is now anathema to the campaign. Obama needs to say that he doesn't seek Wright's support under these circumstances and will not accept it. This will doubtless wound Obama. It will prove racially divisive. But Wright was clearly in his speech Monday advocating racial conflict and division. He is also clearly obsessed with the politics of the boomer era, its racial and cultural divides, and seeks to increase those divides, not overcome them.

So I think Obama has to make a speech condemning him, and explaining why his politics are very, very different. He now has the obvious defense that Wright has attacked him and disowned him -- by calling him insincere. So on this, Wright and Bill Kristol agree.

Obama has to disown his own surrogate father. I see no other way forward. It's terrible it has come to this, but the combination of Wright himself and the MSM makes it impossible to avoid. And so Obama has to take a stand.

Read more of my take from Monday, here.

Robert A. George, columnist for the New York Post

This is a problem from which Obama can't easily extract himself. Rev. Wright is Obama's de facto adoptive father (note how Obama's Philadelphia speech triangulated his relationship with Wright, the black community and his white grandmother). Thus, Wright's actions over the last few days carry something of an Oedipal/prodigal son dimension.

Wright's Jekyll and Hyde nature is inevitably damaging to Obama. At his best -- as he was in much of the NAACP speech and with some aspects of the National Press Club appearance -- Wright comes across as a man of some scholarly depth and sense of American history (the good and the bad). At his worst, however (as, arguably, he was during the press club Q-and-A), he comes across as angry, dismissive and flip (not in a good way).

The Obama many Americans have come to appreciate is similar to the "good Wright." What must unnerve many of those who have voted for Obama or are open to voting for him is the fear that there exists a "Mr. Hyde-Wright" lurking in Obama.

But most injurious to Obama are Wright's assertions that he is speaking out to protect the black church from perceived attack. Wright seemingly feels that Obama, in defending their personal relationship (while distancing himself from Wright's rhetoric), has been insufficiently supportive (i.e., "giving witness to") of the good works that the black church (and Trinity United in particular) does for the black community. Wright seems committed to setting that omission straight. It suggests that he believes Obama has let down the church by not publicly defending it from a perceived attack by the larger white culture (i.e., the media).

But the single most damaging statements Wright made aren't about America, 9/11 or AIDS. It is what he says about Obama -- the person so many voters see as a "different" sort of leader. Wright just said of him what Hillary Clinton must have thought was manna from heaven: "He didn't distance himself. He had to distance himself because he's a politician." Of politicians, Wright says, "Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls." In short, politicians are people without integrity.

Thus, he generally undermines the historic nature many see in Obama's message. But, specifically, he eviscerates Obama's almost universally well-received Philadelphia speech on race, turning it into just another political tactic. If the man who coined the phrase "audacity of hope" thinks a member of his congregation is just a politician who says and does things "based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls," why should voters think that politician is any more special than any of the others?

Jabari Asim, editor in chief of the Crisis magazine

I attended Rev. Wright's address Monday and continue to be impressed by him. I first heard him preach more than 20 years ago, when I was in college. I really think his address had little to do with Obama. I found it most instructive in terms of his ability to eloquently and thoroughly lay out the history of the black Christian tradition in the United States -- although as I sat there in a press gallery that was about 90 percent white, I wondered how much of his message was actually sinking in. In my view, he emphasized the black Christian churches' long commitment to liberation, transformation and reconciliation, which he called "a non-negotiable doctrine." I also noted his efforts to show how his church carried out its commitment in the form of church-owned and -operated senior citizens complexes and day-care centers, along with decades-old ministries devoted to HIV/AIDS patients and prisoners. I was somewhat dismayed and embarrassed to sit there as a member of the working press and watch Rev. Wright encounter questions he had already addressed in the course of his speech, as well as others ("Will Muslims go to heaven?" for example) that had no obvious relevance to Wright or his relationship with Obama.

As eloquent, insightful and forthright as Rev. Wright often is, he understands the need for Obama to address the needs of a national, multicultural constituency, and frequently suggested as much. In turn, Obama recognizes that Rev. Wright is entitled to clear his name and set the record straight regarding his comments. Obama should not let his former pastor's public appearances distract him or those who would vote for him from the issues and problems that continue to challenge all Americans, including the failing economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Next page: "It should not be some kind of national news flash that people of color find it cathartic to criticize America in the relative safety of black churches"