It’s being reported that Senator Barack Obama is going to address the issue of Rev. Jeremiah Wright once more at a press conference later today. I’m going to go out on a limb — if it is a limb — and predict that he will attempt to cut anchor completely; i.e. to completely disown Rev. Wright in a way that he hopes will end the usefulness of the issue for his opponents. To date, remember, all that Obama has done is vaguely reject unspecified statements of Rev. Wright’s that he says he finds offensive, while at the same time saying that these statements do not represent the Rev. Wright he has known during his 20 years of attendance at the Rev. Wright’s church. I think Obama has to cut anchor in a decisive way if he is to continue to be serious about running for president. No one is going to win the presidency while joined at the hip to a man who enthusiastically says “God damn America,” not to mention all the other stuff. And he is joined at the hip: Wright’s was the form of Christianity that Obama first embraced; Wright married the Obamas, baptized their children, inspired the title of Obama’s book, and has been highly lauded by him over and over again.

The question will be of-course be why it took until now — six months before the general election — for Obama to realize that he needed to totally sever himself from this guy. I think that he really believed that he could finesse these questions, all the way through — that he could argue as he has done to date that he embraces the good things he saw from Rev. Wright at the United Church of Christ in Chicago while repudiating all of these incendiary remarks which of-course he never happened to hear. You could say that it’s a measure of just how stupid Barack Obama thinks the voters are, deep down.

What’s changed in the past several days is Obama’s realization that the Rev. Wright is not going to play along. Obama just assumed that Wright would see how important it was that he — Barack Obama — become president, and that the Rev. would stay quiet in the background and give Obama room for his finessing. But Wright doesn’t care. Look at him, for Pete’s sake. He is someone who self-evidently loves the limelight and loves having a platform. He always has — you can easily see he’s as much a performer as a pastor. Now, thanks to the controversy over his famous parishioner who is running for president, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has the biggest platform he’s ever had. Everything he says is national news! Some have also theorized that he actually wants Obama to lose the election, as it will bolster his argument that America continues to be a nation that oppresses black people. It’s hard to say if that’s true, but it’s easy to see that, in the end, Wright doesn’t give a good “g-damn” about cooperating with Obama’s election strategy.

Even Obama can see it, and that’s why, I believe, he’ll be cutting Jeremiah loose — or trying mightily to do so — at the reported press conference later today.

Ironically, while being an absolute prerequisite for a serious run in the general election, it might actually hurt him in the upcoming primaries, as it will be one more example of Obama acting like a regular politician instead of as some kind of super-idealist liberal paradigm.

Gosh. This Hillary/Barack contest is so much fun. If only it could go on forever …

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