Brent Bozell reports in his nationally syndicated column on how The Washington Post covered the Jeremiah Wright story in 2008 -- often with flowers and sympathy for Wright and the people who cheering him on during the "God Damn America" sermons. The Post barely mentioned Wright in 2007, but when they did, it was as part of a generally uplifting look at Obama's background. He was not to be investigated, but he could be explored as a phenomenon.
In the August 12, 2007 Washington Post Magazine, writer Liza Mundy mentioned Obama selecting Wright's church as a (non-cynical) choice to increase his blackness quotient:
The racial question is, of course, complicated and heated. Some commentators, including [former U.S. News & World Report writer] Debra Dickerson and Stanley Crouch, have revived the idea that Obama is not authentically "black," in that he is not the descendant of slaves and thus lacks this classic part of the African American experience. He has also never been what Dickerson calls "black for a living." He's never worked for the NAACP or any advocacy organization whose goal is taking on the white power structure.
Dickerson points out that, early in his career, Obama did a number of crucial things to neutralize this problem of authenticity. He married a black woman, and he joined an inner-city, mostly black church, Trinity United Church of Christ, led by the charismatic pastor Jeremiah Wright. "I'm not saying he doesn't love her, and I'm sure he believes with all his heart," says Dickerson, but both moves helped shore up his credentials. For black politicians, to begin a speech by praising God is "the black secret handshake," she says. "It's like saying, 'Joe sent me.'"
But it's equally important, Dickerson says, that Obama does not speak like Jesse Jackson or Martin Luther King Jr. It may be good that his keynote speech wasn't delivered in King's majestic cadence, because then he might have been too authentically African American. To appeal to whites as well as blacks, he can't do "the whole Southern preacher thing." And appealing to whites is crucial; Clinton does almost as well as Obama among black voters, for whom, Dickerson says, 2008 presents a "delicious" choice.
On December 14, 2007, Post reporter Kevin Merida insisted Obama didn't need Wright as a replacement father, but made him an Obama collaborator, someone he could learn from?
Those who know Obama say he didn't seem to need a replacement father.
He was always good at finding "different kinds of people he could learn from," says Jerry Kellman, a Chicago community organizer who worked with Obama for three years. Abner Mikva became one of those people, as did the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his pastor, as did Illinois Senate President Emil Jones Jr., among others.
Kellman notes that "mentors very quickly ceased to be mentors with Barack, they became collaborators. . . . He was able to form intimate relationships with people, but they were friendships. He was not in search of surrogate fathers."
Merida went on to "narrate" the book titled Obama: The Historic Campaign In Photographs.
