It is midweek. Reverend Jeremiah Wright has spoken and every national news outlet has gone to Code Red.
The fallout from the pastor’s triptych of fulmination (Moyers/NAACP/NPC) has whipped the punditry up into a frenzy. The pollsters are re-tabulating. The Super Delegates are posturing and re-positioning. The operatives are shouting their talking points. The moderators are appealing for calm.
Footage of Wright doing his (not un-amusing) “But-Black-Folks- Do-It-Like-This!” routine is being looped endlessly. As is the image of a tense Obama standing on a runway and looking like his head is about to explode.
And then, almost as an afterthought, the major news divisions all feel obliged to show a clip of Hillary Clinton.
It has a dreamlike quality to it.
She is not standing on a tarmac. It looks like she is addressing a room of about 6 middle-aged white guys. Factory workers, I think they are. One of them has a beard and my guess is that his name is Ned. There's another one over there. I bet his name is Ned too.
This modest audience is located in some town in Indiana, which from the viewpoint of those in Washington and New York might just as well be called Insignificantstan.
But it’s not insignificant to Senator Clinton. She is happy to be there. She is preternaturally relaxed. She is speaking with the most matter-of-fact expression—as if she is lecturing a new crop of interns as to what rules apply when using the office microwave.
What is she talking about? Steel. She is talking about steel and gas taxes and how cars are made. Then she goes off on a tangent about internal combustion engines being outdated. On and on it goes. The Neds nod their heads in agreement. And then she talks about steel some more.
Either I dreamed this all up or it actually happened. And if it did happen it exemplifies everything that was catastrophic about Senator Obama’s week. For here Ms. Clinton was connecting effortlessly with white Blue Collar voters. Those would be the same voters that Reverend Wright did his best to drive into the arms of Senator Obama’s opponent.
Faith and Values politicking, I have been arguing, has its agonies and ecstasies. The agony in the Obama camp will be prolonged. For there is no telling when Reverend Wright might pop up again to helpfully mock the diction of the Kennedy family or to opine that the American government wishes to murder its own citizens.
Guys like Ned hate that sort of stuff. As the good senator pointed out in Philadelphia they too have their gripes and grievances. In the coming few days Obama will have to spend valuable time and energy proving to them (all over again) that he does not share his pastor's vision.
(For more information about religion and the candidates check out Faith 2008 by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs.)
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