Reply #31: No, Wright OFFERED TO CALL Moss. [View All]

[MADem]

Obama had already ASKED Moss, who (apparently after the fact, perhaps after Wright called Moss) turned him down. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/us/politics/01wright.html?ref=us

Mr. Obama then asked whether the Rev. Otis Moss III, who would soon succeed Mr. Wright at Trinity, could speak instead. Mr. Wright agreed, even offering to call the younger preacher. (These quotes are drawn from a year-old interview with Mr. Wright; he shared some of his cellphone messages with a reporter).

“Actually, we’ve already called him,” Mr. Obama told him.

A few minutes later, Mr. Wright got his daughters on the telephone line. “I’m only going to say this once,” he said. “Don’t look at TV tomorrow.”



NYT 1 APR http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/us/politics/06obama.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

After all, back in January, Mr. Obama had asked Mr. Wright if he would begin the event by delivering a public invocation.

But Mr. Wright said Mr. Obama called him the night before the Feb. 10 announcement and rescinded the invitation to give the invocation.

“Fifteen minutes before Shabbos I get a call from Barack,” Mr. Wright said in an interview on Monday, recalling that he was at an interfaith conference at the time. “One of his members had talked him into uninviting me,” Mr. Wright said, referring to Mr. Obama’s campaign advisers.....Instead, Mr. Obama asked Mr. Wright’s successor as pastor at Trinity, the Rev. Otis Moss III, to speak. Mr. Moss declined.




From back in March: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/03/throughout-his.html
But more than a year ago -- long before some of Wright’s more incendiary sermons became hot-button videos on YouTube, forcing Obama to publicly renounce his pastor last week -- the Obama campaign had a sense that Wright's sharp tongue might spell trouble for the Illinois senator. (For a sermon sample, click on the Read more line below.)

That was the word anyway Sunday from Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, who acknowledged during a conference call with reporters that Wright was disinvited ...

from Obama's official candidacy announcement on Feb. 10, 2007, in the shadow of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill.

Wright had been expected to lead an invocation of some kind, but never appeared.

“There was no doubt that there was controversy surrounding him,” Axelrod said Sunday. “And we didn’t want to expose him … make him the target and a distraction on a day when Sen. Obama was going to announce his candidacy.”

So if the savvy Obama campaign knew Wright was a problem a year ago, why did the Illinois senator, a parish member for two decades, wait until last week to disassociate and denounce the minister's inflammatory statements?

The topic is clearly uncomfortable for Obama and his aides, personally and politically. Axelrod's comments came only after prodding from a reporter and after he had initially suggested that Wright’s absence that day was due merely to the fact that the temperature was in the single digits.


If I were running for major office, I'd sure as hell inoculate myself against a loose cannon like Wright....like say, moving far enough away to have an excuse to switch churches. But then, I can't imagine that someone who donated THAT MUCH money to that church had no damn CLUE about what the guy was preaching. If he didn't, he's STUPID. If he did, he's being disingenous with the American people now.

Snap judgment? Twenty years is more than enough time to figure that shit out. Sorry. Wright is "news" because Wright's theology and message are so very antithetical to what Obama is pushing. It makes Obama's schtick just not believable. That's the problem here, some major cognitive dissonance.