Inside Politics

Oprah knew

One wonders what Oprah Winfrey could see in the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. that Sen. Barack Obama couldn’t.

“Winfrey was a member of Trinity United [Church of Christ] from 1984 to 1986, and she continued to attend off and on into the early to the mid-1990s. But then she stopped. A major reason — but by no means the only reason — was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright,” writes Allison Samuels for the latest edition of Newsweek.

“According to two sources, Winfrey was never comfortable with the tone of Wright’s more incendiary sermons, which she knew had the power to damage her standing as America’s favorite daytime talk-show host. ’Oprah is a businesswoman, first and foremost,’ said one longtime friend, who requested anonymity when discussing Winfrey’s personal sentiments,” Miss Samuels writes.

Mr. Obama has said several times that he had no knowledge at the time of Mr. Wright’s most notorious sermons, in which he said that blacks should call on God to smite America rather than bless it and has said the AIDS virus could have been created by the U.S. government as an anti-black genocide weapon. According to Newsweek, the Obama camp called it unfair to compare the two people’s choices, saying the Illinois senator needed to discover his blackness at Trinity.

“Early on, he was in search of his identity as an African-American and, more importantly, as an African-American man. Reverend Wright and other male members of the church were instrumental in helping him understand the black experience in America. … She’s secure in her blackness, so that didn’t have a hold on her,” Newsweek quoted a campaign adviser as saying.

Obvious question

What can it be that has kept Sen. Barack Obama in the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s pews, and at Mr. Wright’s mercy, for so long and at such a heavy cost to his aspirations, Christopher Hitchens asks at www.slate.com.

“Even if he pulls off a mathematical nomination victory, he has completely lost the first, fine, careless rapture of a post-racial and post-resentment political movement and mired us again in all the old rubbish that predates [Martin Luther] King. What a sad thing to behold. And how come? … Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?” Mr. Hitchens writes.

“This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it. (One can picture Obama looking pained and sensitive and saying, ’Keep my wife out of it,’ or words to that effect, as Clinton tried to do in 1992 when Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader quite correctly inquired about his spouse’s influence.) If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company — and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable — then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.

“I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama’s 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is ’Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.’ To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be ’read’ at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn’t written in any known language. Anyway, at quite an early stage in the text, Michelle Obama announces that she’s much influenced by the definition of black ’separationism’ offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 screed ’Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America.’ ”

Up in smoke

The Senate Rules Committee has snuffed out the last two places where smoking was allowed in Senate office buildings.

The two smoking rooms closed yesterday by the committee’s action were next to a coffee shop in the basement of the Hart Senate Office building and in the Dirksen Senate Office building cafeteria, according to a press release from Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, New Jersey Democrat, who advocated the smoking ban.

Luring Teamsters

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama yesterday said if elected president he would examine the strict government oversight of the Teamsters union aimed at rooting out corruption, but denied any blanket commitment to end the federal monitoring, Reuters news agency reports.

Mr. Obama was discussing a Wall Street Journal report that said he won the endorsement of the Teamsters after privately telling it he backed an end to special federal oversight set up to eliminate the influence of organized crime in the union.

“I wouldn’t make any blanket commitments,” the Illinois senator told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“What I’ve said is that I would examine what is going on in terms of the federal oversight that’s been taking place, but it’s been in place for many years.”

Mr. Obama said the Teamsters had done “a terrific job cleaning house” and suggested it could be time for the Teamsters “to get treated just like every other union.”

“That’s something that I’ll absolutely examine when I’m president of the United States,” he said.

• Greg Pierce can be reached at 202/636-3285 or gpierce@washingtontimes .com.