Disowning Your Grandmother

The problem with being a politician is that you have to sometimes be, well, political. The best thing about being above the fray is that you are above the fray. The problem with being a politician who wants to be above the fray … Just read the above two sentences again.

Less than two months ago Barack Obama gave an eloquent defense of his pastor of more than 20 years. He told the nation he wants to lead that there was more to the man than the caricature that had been drawn of him. Many took that to show that Obama had political courage. The professional campaigners looked on it as a tactical error.

Obama then famously uttered these words:

“I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

But today he essentially disowned the man who performed his marriage ceremony and led the church that taught his daughters its doctrine.

“They offend me. They rightly offend all Americans and they should be denounced. And that’s what I’m doing very clearly and unequivocally today,” Obama said.

“The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago.”

The Atlantic‘s Marc Ambinder has sources who say Obama got “deeply, visibly angry” after reading about Wright’s Press Club comments.

I’m sure he did. We all get a little angry when someone is ruining our best-laid plans. Kinda like former President Clinton getting red in the face and screaming at voters when the campaign trail has gotten rocky over the last few months.

However, Obama’s most telling quote wasn’t about what he thinks about the Rev. Wright now. The most telling comment was why he now thinks it. In his own words, “I don’t think he showed much concern for me … and what we are trying to do in this campaign.” To Obama, the problem with Wright was the damage to the presidential campaign. Talk about candor.

The essential question for voters is: What did Obama hear yesterday that was more offensive than the statements he already knew about? Statements such as the United States government was behind the AIDS virus. Or the “God damn America” diatribe.

What damage this episode has done to Obama in the Democratic primary has probably already been done. But the disowning damage has not been completed for general-election voters, especially independents.

Obama’s real credibility problem isn’t simply what the New York Post called a “Pastor Disaster.” The problem is Obama is now contradicting things he said so definitively a few weeks ago, knee-deep in the trenches and acting like a … politician.