With Wright and Rezko, Obama confronted with the needs of fast response

The controversy over comments and sermons of Rev Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor has dominated the news for the past 48 hours (pretty much as soon as the Geraldine Ferraro controversy faded). The story has been driven especially hard -- and very successfully -- by the conservative media, as evidenced by O'Reilly railing against the "corrupt liberal media" and their failure to cover this story.

At the risk of falling into that same corruption, I have stayed away from this topic, as you might have noticed. This blog's purpose, after all, is not to provide detailed news updates of every single event on the campaign trail, but to analyze them and explore what they might mean for the campaign's dynamics. But now that the Wright affair has become such an integral part of the political discussion, addressing it has become unavoidable. If you are not up to date on the Wright affair or on the pastor's comments that started this controversy, the New York Times account is a good place to start. It describes Wright -- a popular preacher with a 6,000 person congregation who goes around the country in lecture tours -- as advocating black liberation theology.

More than anything, it is the closeness of Obama's ties with Wright that are haunting him today: The pastor baptized his daughters, inspired the title of his book The Audacity of Hope, and Wright himself declared this week that he had discussed with Obama the probability that the Illinois Senator would have to distance himself from him... not the best way for Obama to prove his sincerity. Aware of the potential damage the story might inflict on him, Obama made the rounds of cable TV last night, with interviews on Anderson Cooper and Keith Olbermann, among others.

Yet undefined, Obama fails to incite the hatred of the GOP the way that Hillary Clinton does. If anything, many Clinton-haters on the Right probably see him more as the politician who finally slayed a Clinton than as someone they are focused on beating. Worried about this, the Right knows it needs to get its base excited at least somewhat as excited about beating Obama than they are about beating Clinton; otherwise, they could face a dramatic turnout problem in the fall. By questioning Obama's patriotism (and inventing stories about his refusal to recite the pledge of allegiance), it is his image as a centrist uniter that conservatives are seeking to undermine -- and do so fast enough to introduce Obama in that way to voters who don't know him yet. The racial subtext is evident: Wright is being made into the latest incarnation of the Malcolm X-type black radical -- the angry black man -- and that's not an image Obama wants to be associated with in the coming months, to say the least.

Obama is facing this crisis at particularly difficult time. The stories about his association with Rezko have picked up in full force as the trial of the Chicago real estate developer started last week. While the first reports of potential troubles in Obama's ties to Rezko emerged months ago, news is still tricking in, for example in this new Politico article titled "Rezko's role bigger than admitted."

In the common explosion of the Wright and Rezko stories, Obama is confronted with the need of fast response. It is because of their prodigious ability to counter such stories rapidly that Bush was so successful in 2004; and it is because he did it so poorly (waiting so long to respond to the Swift Boat ads) that Kerry collapsed in August of that year.

Given how (poorly) the Obama campaign has been dealing with similar stories over the past few weeks they have to consider themselves lucky that they are getting training so far in advance of the general election. Consider Rezko, for example: Stories have been written for months about it without the Obama campaign attempting a true push back. It took Clinton's mentioning Rezko's name at the South Carolina debate for Obama to start waking up. And the Chicago Tribune finds itself very satisfied with Obama's defense during the long meeting the senator agrees to conduct with them, but expresses puzzlement that "U.S. Sen. Barack Obama waited 16 months to attempt the exorcism."

The Wright affair followed a similar pattern. Obama waited for the crisis to explode on national television to address it, when the fact that this would eventually cause a major controversy was evident for many months now. And while he spent his night in damage control last night and pushed Wright to resign from his campaign, efforts to counter this line of attack should have been made earlier.

The unwillingness of Obama's war room to defend itself fast enough was first manifest last month in the controversy over Michelle Obama's national pride comments. The Obamas then let the controversy grow without addressing it, which is the tactic the Kerry campaign had employed in 2004 hoping that the Swift Boat allegations would soon appear to outrageous to stick. But that's not how modern campaigns are working... and this is the surest way of meeting Kerry's 2004 fate. But Kerry learned this lesson late in the general election campaign, whereas Obama still has time to amend his campaign's war room rules.