Middle American News

Chilton Williamson, May 2008

roverbial wisdom has it that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. And the way into his soul may often be through his wife. This thought occurred to me the other day when I was reading still another newspaper article about Barack Obama and his 20-year relationship with his pastor, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Obama’s popularity arises from the perception on the part of sentimental liberals that the Senator from Illinois represents America’s postracial future and the beginning of the country’s first truly new political experiment since the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1789. Thus his admirers have difficulty in explaining how Obama could have “worshiped” for two decades at a church whose presiding minister, from the pulpit, has referred to the Unites States as “the U.S. of KKK-A,” stated that “Bill Clinton done us [American blacks] like he done Monica Lewinsky”, charged that “America created AIDS to kill black people,” and interrupted a sermon to shout “God damn America! God damn America!”

The answer, so it seems to me, was provided by Michelle Obama shortly before Rev. Wright became, overnight, the most famous black American minister since Martin Luther King, Jr. (King, as a member of the Communist Party, may be assumed to have held views about his country not dissimilar to those of Jeremiah Wright’s).

Speaking to a crowd in Milwaukee on 18 February 2008, Mrs. Obama confided, “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country, because I feel that hope is making a comeback.” A week before, she had told “60 Minutes” that she does not lose sleep over the fear that her husband might be the victim of a political assassination, because “the realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know.” (In which event, by the way, the overwhelming statistical probability would be that his killer was not a white man but another black one.) Mrs. Obama, who was raised in a single-room apartment on the South Shore of Chicago, attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School on scholarship and was hired after graduation by a law firm in downtown Chicago. Thus she has been for the better part of her life the beneficiary, however deserving, of white munificence—a fact that appears to provoke her sense of resentment rather than her gratitude.

There is no particular reason to accept her husband’s conversion to Christianity at more than face value—that is to say, at politically discounted value. Barack Obama does not impress one as being a man of deep spirituality (or deep anything, for that matter), nor is it likely that genuine faith is a commodity readily discoverable at Trinity United Church of Christ. The stereotype of the lukewarm husband who gratifies his wife by being married in the church of her choice, having his children baptized there, and attending its weekly services is both a longstanding and a familiar one. While I do not mean to impugne Mr. Obama’s faith as a hypocritical pretense, it does strike me as likely that the choice of Rev. Wright as the Obama family pastor was very Mrs. Obama’s, not her husband’s. Sitting for hours listening to rants accusing the United States of being a racist country and blaming the evils of this world on white greed is not really Barack Obama’s style. But it does seem to be Michelle’s. Indeed, certain of her public utterances sound like insipid attempts at imitating the flamboyant rhetorical style of the pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ.

The truth is that the Obama phemomenon represents, not a postracial breakthrough, but the old familiar politics of racial resentment in America, in respect at least of black voters. Insofar as Barack Obama differs from most other black American politicians, that is owing to his status as a first-generation mulatto, whose father was an African black, and not an African-American at all. Michelle Obama too is quite obviously of mixed racial descent, but she, unlike her husband, is a fully acculturated member of black American culture in the post-civil-rights era, formed in the 1960s and assiduously shaped and aggravated for the past 40 years by racial hustlers and demagogues. Probably, Barack does not share her resentments. But he doesn’t seem offended by them either, or by the type of opinion and speech such resentments produce. And he may indeed be more a product of black America than he appears. Tellingly, Senator Obama in 2006 opposed Michigan’s Proposition 2, sponsored by Ward Connerly (also a man of mixed ancestry), which would have ended affirmative action in Michigan for minorities and women. Moreover, he seems to have felt confident that having such a man as Jeremiah Wright as his pastor could not be a major political liability for him in a society in which minority victim status is indulged and catered to. Hence, both Obama’s character as a man and his judgment as a politician have been thrown open to question.

When his relationship with Wright and Trinity United became an unexpected scandal, Obama’s instincts must have warned him that to repudiate the man outright after an association of 20 years simply would not be a credible act. (Also, it would have been one for which he would have had to answer to his wife.) His way out of the dilemma was the famous address in Philadelphia, which received enthusiastic reviews from liberal white commentators but was ignored almost entirely by black ones, and which belied its irenic tone by implying that, while American blacks have genuine grievances against whites, white grievances against blacks, though honestly perceived, are for the most part illusions created by right-wing politicians and commentators. The speech, clever as it was, has caused many whites to think twice about Barack Obama, and to question his claim to be the Moses ordained by Jahweh to lead America up from the bondage of her racialist past. It has not prompted media commentators to consider the bedrock issue regarding the candidate’s 20-year involvement with Trinity United Church of Christ.

In the 1930s, Father Charles Edward Coughlin was the Roman Catholic priest at the National Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan. An ardent Democrat and enemy of Wall Street bankers, Coughlin for a year or two supported Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. But in 1934, he turned against Roosevelt and began denouncing the President as a tool of Wall Street. In 1936, dismayed by the returns from the national elections, Fr. Coughlin began to express sympathy, on his immensely popular radio show, for the governments of Hitler and Mussolini, which he regarded as bulwarks against the Bolshevist threat. The Russian Revolution, Coughlin charged, “was launched and fomented by distinctively Jewish [atheistical] influence.” Coughlin argued further that the Depression was the result of an “international conspiracy of Jewish bankers.” In 1938, in a speech delivered in New York, Fr. Coughlin thrust forth his right arm in salute as he shouted, “When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.” As a founder of the Union Party, Coughlin advocated “Less care for internationalism and more concern for national prosperity.”

Joseph P. Kennedy was a dedicated enemy of Fr. Coughlin’s and played a significant role in having his radio program shut down by the Vatican. He was also (until 1940) a fervent isolationist himself and father of the man who, as a student at Choate, became a junior member of the America First Committee and later, while at Harvard, sent AFC one hundred dollars enfolded in a note saying, “What you are all doing is vital.”

Does anyone doubt that, had John F. Kennedy been shown, twenty-odd years later, to have had even the most tenuous association with Fr. Coughlin and the Shrine of the Little Flower, he would never have been nominated by the Democratic Party to run for the office of President of the United States?