Up to now I had taken it for granted that Jeremiah Wright wanted Obama to win the nomination and the presidency--and that was why he had not been seen or heard from since the controversy over his sermons first blew up. Obama's speech on race had seemed to repair much of the damage, and though his association with Wright remained a problem, things had moved on and it was not going to sink him. Now this:

Should it become necessary in the months from now to identify the moment that doomed Obama's presidential aspirations, attention is likely to focus on the hour between nine and ten this morning at the National Press Club. It was then that Wright, Obama's longtime pastor, reignited a controversy about race from which Obama had only recently recovered - and added lighter fuel.


Speaking before an audience that included Marion Barry, Cornel West, Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party and Nation of Islam official Jamil Muhammad, Wright praised Louis Farrakhan, defended the view that Zionism is racism, accused the United States of terrorism, repeated his view that the government created the AIDS virus to cause the genocide of racial minorities, stood by other past remarks ("God damn America") and held himself out as a spokesman for the black church in America.

In front of 30 television cameras, Wright's audience cheered him on as the minister mocked the media and, at one point, did a little victory dance on the podium. It seemed as if Wright, jokingly offering himself as Obama's vice president, was actually trying to doom Obama; a member of the head table, American Urban Radio's April Ryan, confirmed that Wright's security was provided by bodyguards from Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.

Wright suggested that Obama was insincere in distancing himself from his pastor. "He didn't distance himself," Wright announced. "He had to distance himself, because he's a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American."

Explaining further, Wright said friends had written to him and said, "We both know that if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected." The minister continued: "Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls."

I think one can imagine how delighted Obama must have been to read accounts of this appearance. What I would love to know, though, is what Wright and those cheering leaders of the black community are thinking. The obvious theory is that Wright must want Obama to lose, and thus affirm the pastor's account of all that is sick about the country: God damn America, too bigoted a nation to elect a black man president. If that is what he is doing, and he keeps it up, he may yet get his way.