Inside Politics

Swift suspension

Republican Sen. John McCain’s campaign suspended a staffer who sent out a provocative video linking Democratic presidential contender Sen. Barack Obama to the comments of his spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

The staffer, a low-level aide named Soren Dayton, sent out a link yesterday to the YouTube video, titled “Is Obama Wright?” on the social-messaging Web site Twitter. It mixes Mr. Wright’s most incendiary remarks with snippets from Obama speeches and interviews, which are edited to make the senator seem to be sputtering and unpatriotic.

The campaign suspended him a few hours later, although it wouldn’t say for how long, the Associated Press reported.

“We have been very clear on the type of campaign we intend to run and this staffer acted in violation of our policy,” campaign spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker said. “He has been reprimanded by campaign leadership and suspended from the campaign.”

The Politico, a Washington-based newspaper, reported that the two-minute video was the work of Lee Habeeb, a former producer of the Laura Ingraham Show, a conservative talk program.

‘Obama blew it’

“In my considered judgment as a race and civil rights specialist, I would say that Barack Obama’s ‘momentous’ speech on race settled on merely ‘explaining’ so-called racial differences between blacks and whites — and in so doing amplified deep-seated racial tensions and divisions,” Michael Meyers writes in the Los Angeles Times.

“Instead of giving us a polarizing treatise on the ‘black experience,’ Obama should have reiterated the theme that has brought so many to his campaign: That race ain’t what it used to be in America,” said Mr. Meyers, who is executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition and a former assistant national director of the NAACP.

“He should have presented us a pathway out of our racial boxes and a road map for new thinking about race. He should have depicted his minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., as a symbol of the dysfunctional angry men who are stuck in the past and who must yield to a new generation of color-blind, hopeful Americans and to a new global economy in which we will look on our neighbors’ skin color no differently than how we look on their eye color.

“In fact, I’d say that considering the nation’s undivided attention to this all-important speech, which gave him an unrivaled opportunity to lift us out of racial and racist thinking, Obama blew it.”

Applauding Obama

“I guess I’m not supposed to like Sen. Barack Obama’s Philadelphia speech — at least if I want to keep my conservative credentials intact. But I did — and join Charles Murray in celebrating its subtlety, seriousness, and patriotism. What other prominent contemporary black politician could or would have given such a speech?” Abigail Thernstrom writes at National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com).

“Yes, Rev. Jeremiah Wright is full of hateful, anti-American rhetoric, but his views are clearly not those of the Illinois senator. Indeed, the Philadelphia speech had something of Martin Luther King Jr.’s belief in what Obama called his ‘the decency and generosity of the American people.’

“As King did, Obama appealed to our better angels, asking Americans to join him in continuing the ‘long march … for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring, and more prosperous America.’ And he distanced himself from those who, like Wright, depicted a ‘profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that is right with America. …’

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