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04/30/2008

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Wright Seen Fueling New Jewish Anxiety

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by James D. Besser
Washington Correspondent

Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago preacher whose fiery sermons and controversial views threaten to bring down Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, this week tried to prove that he is not an extremist by praising a Chicago Jewish activist and citing his relationship with her group.

But in a series of speeches and interviews Rev. Wright mostly succeeded in raising his profile at a time when the Obama campaign hoped he would fade from view. He also seemed to succeed in widening a racial divide that could represent the biggest single obstacle to the Illinois senator’s political aspirations.

And by restating his admiration for Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and citing a publication seen by many Jewish leaders as deeply biased against Israel, Rev. Wright may

have reinforced the fears of Jewish voters who worry Obama may be weak in his support for Israel, said Kean University political scientist Gilbert Kahn.

“It affirms the worst fears of many Jewish voters” he said. “It’s tragic because I don’t think Obama is a radical, I don’t think his views have any resemblance to the ravings of Rev. Wright. But he has gotten caught in something that can destroy his campaign and that denies him credibility in many Jewish circles.”

Even in Chicago, where mainstream Jewish organizations often work with flamboyant, controversial ministers like Rev. Wright on local issues, there is growing unease.

“Our community has been much less focused on the Wright controversy than the national Jewish leadership because we work with black churches all the time,” said a Chicago Jewish community leader who asked for anonymity because of his continued ties to Obama. “But the Wright issue and the way the campaign has handled it are starting to raise the level of concern.

“Sen. Obama is still very popular in the Chicagoland Jewish community,” the source said, “but if the Illinois primary was held all over again, he probably wouldn’t do as well as he did in February.”

For a reeling Obama campaign, Wright’s re-emergence couldn’t have come at a worse time — days before the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, and as the Democratic “superdelegates” who now hold the nomination in their hands are being pressed to choose sides in the fight with Sen. Hillary Clinton.

But this week Rev. Wright has made it clear he has no intention of lowering his profile.

“For whatever reason — for his own psyche or because of his feeling that this is all about attacks on the black church — he is not going to go away,” said Ellen Cannon, a political scientist at Northeastern Illinois State University. “That poses a very real problem for Obama; the superdelegates, who are very concerned about which candidate can win in November, are absolutely watching this.”

In a whirlwind round of speeches and interviews that made national headlines for several days, Rev. Wright sought to counter depictions of his views as extreme while repeating some of his most controversial statements.

He defended his harsh attacks on America, refused to back away from his claim that government doctors may have helped spread AIDS and repeated his praise for Louis Farrakhan, implying the Nation of Islam leader wasn’t anti-Semitic because he said “Zionism, not Judaism, was gutter religion.”

Possibly more damaging to Obama and satisfying to GOP ad writers, he brushed off the candidate’s efforts to distance himself from the pastor as strictly political.

“If Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would not get elected,” Rev. Wright said.

On Israel, he conceded that Israel “has a right to exist.” But as if to prove his support, he cited “The Link,” a publication of Americans for Middle East Understanding (AMEU) — a group that some Jewish leaders say is unabashedly biased against Israel.

“There has to be concern when [Rev. Wright] says, if you want to understand my positions, read ‘The Link,’” said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. Foxman said AMEU is “as anti-Israel a group as you can imagine. The latest issue of ‘The Link’ is an attack on Israel’s existence.”

Foxman said Obama is “trying hard” to disassociate himself from his controversial ex-pastor, but that “I don’t know what will be enough” to allay concerns among Jews and voters in general. “I think there will have to be a time when Sen. Obama will need to be more specific about Rev. Wright and what he stands for.”

On Tuesday the candidate tried to do just that — a shift from his initial reaction to Rev. Wright’s media onslaught, when Obama suggested the media was exaggerating the controversy.

In a hastily arranged press conference a calm but obviously worried Obama emphatically broke with the Chicago cleric. Obama said he was “outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw yesterday” and professed ignorance of Rev. Wright’s more strident views.

“The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago,” he said. “His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate.”

He also rejected Wright’s claim that he was disavowing the minister only out of political expedience. “If Reverend Wright thinks that that’s political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn’t know me very well,” he said.

But Obama also acknowledged what is becoming a distressing bottom line for his campaign.

“I cannot prevent him from continuing to make these outrageous remarks, but what I do want him to be very clear about, as well as all of you and the American people, is that when I say I find these comments appalling, I mean it,” he said.

Cannon said Obama’s campaign misjudged the impact of the Wright-Obama relationship from the outset and that the biggest impact will be “on independent voters” — a segment Obama needs to attract to beat Republican John McCain in November.

Benjamin Ginsberg, a Johns Hopkins political scientist, said the revived controversy stirs up a race issue Obama hoped to transcend with his widely praised speech on the subject in March.

The Wright controversy “reminds Democratic voters that Obama is black — and a lot of white, blue collar voters are reluctant to vote for a black,” Ginsberg said. “The New York Times doesn’t like to admit this, but it is a fact; everything Wright says upsets these voters and hurts Obama.”

The Wright factor also complicates Obama’s outreach to nervous Jewish voters, Ginsberg said, particularly because of the pastor’s continuing defense Farrakhan, regarded by many Jewish leaders as the nation’s leading anti-Semite.

For Jews, the big issue raised by the revived Wright controversy is Israel, not race, Ginsberg said.

“Jews, more than almost any other group of voters, are eager to overlook race,” he said. If not for Wright, I think most Jews would have been happy to vote for Obama. But the Wright issue has changed that, mostly because of concerns about Israel.”

But Kahn of Kean University said many Jewish voters will connect the dots between the race factor and Israel as they digest the news about the latest Wright eruption.

“For many in our community, this reinforces their worst fears about some elements in the black community and their attitudes toward Israel and toward the Jews. They’re not worried those attitudes are Barack Obama’s, but there is an element of guilt by indirect association.”

Despite repeated meetings with Jewish leaders and statements reaffirming his pro-Israel views, there were signs Obama’s standing with Jewish voters was slipping, Kahn said. The cited the recent Pennsylvania primary, where Sen. Clinton took 62 percent of the Jewish vote.

More significant was the fact that Obama lost a Jewish demographic in Pennsylvania there that was supposed to be part of his base — suburban, affluent and well educated.

Even in Chicago, where Obama is a hometown favorite with Jewish voters, there is anxiety.

In his speech to the NAACP, Rev. Wright acknowledged a local American Jewish Committee leader, Melanie Maron, who had arranged joint programs with his church. That points to a more tolerant view of relations with African-American churches by a number of mainstream Jewish groups in a city where black ministers are tightly woven into the local power structure and where most black clergy have ties to the Nation of Islam.

“That’s part of the South Side narrative,” said Ellen Cannon. “Farrakhan is a major political force here. If you’re part of the black infrastructure here, Farrakhan is not someone you can walk around.”

But Chicago Jews, too, are worried.

“We know [Obama], we’ve worked with him, and we have a good relationship with the African American community,” said Howard Carroll, a former Democratic state senator and longtime Jewish communal leader. “We understand little more about the rhetoric Rev. Wright and others have used from the pulpits; we take it with more of a grain of salt.”

But the Wright controversy “is not helping Obama now, as he has said himself; as long as it’s on front pages around the country, it keeps alive something he though he had put behind him.”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization