Mitt and Obama's Shared Liability

When Mitt Romney first ran for the Senate in 1994, he was compelled to pose as something he was not in order to blend into the native political underbrush. Thus, he went out of his way to assert his pro-gay, pro-Roe v. Wade credentials, and even disclaim connections to Ronald Reagan. This posturing would have been unnecessary in even most "purple" states, but in Massachusetts, that bluest of blue states, he was not viable unless he denied he had a red corpuscle in his body.

This came back to haunt him fourteen years later, when in running for president he discovered that the conservative social agenda and the legacy of Reagan still carried enormous weight with the Republican base. Thus, he was forced to have suspiciously convenient "epiphanies." My own assessment is that Romney never was a Massachusetts liberal, but he was ambitious and cynical enough to pose as one. And that is justifiably disturbing to many people.

When Barack Obama first ran for the Illinois legislature in 1997 and for a South Chicago congressional seat in 2000, he, too, was compelled to pose as something he was not. As the son of a white mother who was raised in a white world and attended prestigious ivy league schools, he lacked credibility on the streets of Chicago.

Jeremiah Wright offered such credibility. It is not unreasonable to suppose an element of condescension in Obama's attitude toward Reverend Wright, then as now. Such condescension certainly comes through today:

The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and, yes, the bitterness and biases that make up the black experience in America.

This is not the voice of an insider. This is the voice of a very self-conscious outsider. The kind of outsider who knew full well that the incendiary rhetoric Mr. Wright was wont to fling only perpetuated the "bitterness" and "ignorance" he points to.

It is the voice of an outsider who knew that when Wright blamed the AIDS virus on the US government, he was perpetuating a vicious and dangerous lie. And that when he trashed the United States repeatedly in the most vulgar terms -- even immediately after 9/11, calling it "America's chickens coming home to roost," -- he was giving aid and comfort to our enemies. (Of course, Wright didn't see it that way, because in his eyes, we, i.e., the rest of America, were the enemy.)

But Barack Obama, the Columbia and Harvard grad, indulged all of this because he was borrowing street-level legitimacy for his political ambitions.

And, like Mitt Romney, he is surprised to find that ten years later people are intensely interested in who you are and where you came from, not just what you say and how smoothly. And when they find that the man who claims to transcend the racial divide instead wallowed willingly in its most wretched abscesses, they are bound to be more than a little disappointed.

Jeremiah Wright hates. No one thinks that Barack hates. But suddenly he seems to be merely opportunist, calculating and ambitious -- the qualities we expected from Hillary, not him. For a man who had nothing to say or to offer than transcendence, hope and charm, his offerings suddenly seem quite thin.

UPDATE: A quick note to those who would assume from the foregoing, as a few of you below have, that my objection to Rev. Wright and his relationship with Obama has anything to do with their race. It's not about race. It's about hate and irrationality and poison on the one side, and a willingness to enable it on the other. I would feel the same, whatever the race of the parties, and whatever the nature of the nature of the hate. I don't think Reverend Wright's demagoguery is that different from the nutty Christian sect that marches around protesting at military funerals.