Gray Lady Down by William McGowan Page B

something “different” from what whites were used to hearing.
    According to Jodi Kantor’s first article in 2007, black liberation theology “interprets the Bible as the story of the struggles of black people, who by virtue of their oppression are better able to understand Scripture than those who have suffered less.” A longer analysis by Michael Powell in May 2008, headlined “Race and the Race: A Fiery Theology under Fire,” called Reverend Wright a “man of capacious learning and ego,” and “one of the foremost
adherents of this [black liberation] theology.” Powell quoted James Cone in a jocular mood, chuckling as he remarked, “You might say we took our Christianity from Martin and our emphasis on blackness from Malcolm.”
    For his part, Obama would not give up Wright. But as pressure mounted, he and his campaign decided that Obama should make a major speech on race in America, a speech which some later saw as one of American political history’s great orations, while others dismissed it as a “subject-changing speech.” There was some criticism of the speech at the New York Times. Maureen Dowd saw through the lofty rhetoric and charged that it was pitched to superdelegates queasy about Obama’s spiritual guide, the virulent racial pride, the separatism, the deep suspicion of America and the white man—the very things that Obama’s “postracial” identity was supposed to transcend. Dowd, almost alone, underscored the fact that Obama had now reversed his previous statement that he had never heard any of Wright’s controversial remarks while he sat in the pews. But she also lent a note of tough-love support: “Leaders don’t need to be messiahs.”
    Yet almost everything else the Times ran on the speech was celebratory, with the editorial, op-ed and news pages so harmonically converged that it was hard to tell the difference. There was no notice, let alone evaluation, of Obama’s equating his grandmother’s private prejudices with the systemized racial hatred that underlay Wright’s comments and worldview. Nor did anyone at the Times note the speech’s central contradiction, as Rich Lowry did, that “In the end, Obama made the case for the respectability of a man who is a hater—and did it, amazingly enough, in a speech devoted to ending divisiveness.”
    Janny Scott’s starry-eyed “news analysis” called it “a speech whose frankness about race many historians said could be likened only to speeches by Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln.” While it acknowledged the country’s troubled racial past, she wrote, “the speech was also hopeful, patriotic, quintessentially American—delivered against a blue backdrop and a phalanx of stars and stripes.” Scott also
quoted Obama supporters and longtime activist-intellectuals like John Hope Franklin and a tearful Julian Bond, but her analysis featured no one with a less triumphalist point of view.
    Under unremitting pressure, although not from the Times, Obama eventually gave up on Wright and cut his ties to Trinity United Church of Christ. Wright made a series of appearances where his fury was noticeable and bizarrely expressed. In late April 2008, for instance, he gave a televised sit-down interview with Bill Moyers, a speech to the NAACP, and a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington. In his publicity trifecta, he claimed that attacks on him and Obama were really attacks on the black church. He refused to apologize for his “God damn America” remark and also refused to retract his claim that AIDS was an invention of the U.S. government, citing the Tuskegee experiment to argue that the government was “capable of anything.” Along the way, he also compared U.S. troops to the Roman legions who murdered Christ.
    The Times barely covered the Moyers interview and the NAACP event, but finally, after the Press Club appearance, did a front-pager on the publicity spree. Yet the effect of the