The President's Reverend Wright Moment

Last Wednesday evening we got a small glimmer of our President’s thinking. I am talking about his comments during his health care press conference on the Cambridge Police incident. If you have not heard about the ensuing controversy, the reader’s digest version is a Cambridge police officer while responding to a dispatch of a robbery in progress found a man in the house. As it turned out the person was the homeowner who had broken into his own home when he could not find his keys. Here the story splits depending on the teller’s point of view. The police officer says he finally had to arrest the man for createing a public disturbance when he kept screaming and yelling. The man, a black university professor, claims the police officer was a racist bigot for challenging his presence in his own home.

Enter President Obama. It seems the man turned out to be a friend of the President’s. When asked about the situation in the press conference, the president indicated he did not know all the facts, but the “Cambridge Police acted stupidly.” He then went on a rant about continued bad treatment of blacks by white police.

Thus the President’s Reverend Wright Moment: The response and following rant came as pure instinct on Obama’s part. (You could tell, as the teleprompter did not have the normally smooth easy words for him to answer with.) When one’s response is instinctive, it usually comes out of a core belief inculcated from lessons learned in the past. The President spent twenty years under the tutelage of Reverend Wright, the black theology preacher, whose radical white-hate teachings were exposed during the last election. The president’s shift from a specific incident in which he confessed ignorance of to describing a litany of past black grievances, and then projecting them into today’s society came out of his lessons under Rev. Wright. The President’s comments were not as incendiary in tone as Wright’s would have been, but nonetheless, contained the underlying essence of black victim-supremacy theology, which Wright espouses.

This insight of the President’s thinking is unsettling and portends for a rocky road ahead.