Believer: My Forty Years in Politics by David Axelrod

Author:David Axelrod [David Axelrod]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594205873
Amazon: 1594205876
Publisher: Penguin Press
Published: 2015-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

TO HELL (OR AT LEAST ALTOONA) AND BACK

IT COULD HAVE BEEN called “Wright’s Greatest Hits,” a carefully edited video of some of the reverend’s most incendiary sound bites. Three decades of his sermons were mashed into a few explosive minutes of outrage, a missile directed right at the heart of our campaign.

With losses in Ohio and Texas, and another tough battle looming in Pennsylvania, the jarring video was an unwelcome intrusion in a race that already had become a grinding slog.

“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye . . . and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards,” Wright thundered, in one of the most incendiary clips, recorded after the 9/11 attacks. “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

In another, he railed against the historic injustices African Americans had faced.

“. . . God Bless America? No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America—that’s in the Bible—for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America, as long as she tries to act like she is God, and she is supreme. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent.”

It was sharp, provocative language of the sort that might be heard from pulpits of many black churches. Yet this wasn’t just any church or any pastor. It was Obama’s church and the pastor whom he had portrayed as a central influence in his life. Whether these selected moments of rage and indignation reflected the central message in the sermons from which they were plucked, let alone the entirety of Reverend Wright’s life or ministry, was immaterial. There was no room in this heated presidential campaign for interpretation or nuance or allowances for ministerial hyperbole. It was trouble.

Videos of Reverend Wright first started appearing on the Fox News TV show of right-wing shock jock Sean Hannity, who had made Reverend Wright a focus throughout the campaign. Two days after the Mississippi primary, however, the story went mainstream when Brian Ross, an investigative reporter for ABC News, ran the now infamous tape on Good Morning America. I was convinced it had been leaked to Ross by an opposing campaign. Later, Ross disclosed that, having been denied an interview with Reverend Wright, he was informed by the church that DVDs of all Wright’s sermons were available for purchase. It was a good investment for ABC. The condensed reel Ross put together from the videos sent the political world into an immediate uproar.

When Obama first announced his candidacy, there were many in and out of the media who questioned whether the country was ready to embrace the idea of an African American president. Now the Wright tapes had rekindled those questions, threatening to undermine Barack’s image as a positive, unifying figure. In his writings, Barack had

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