Rev. Wright: How Super PAC attacks may define the election

Unemployment lingers above 8 percent, and “Americans are still unsure what the future holds economically,” said Roland Martin in CNN.com. Yet some deranged right-wingers think the best way to win the 2012 election is to again dredge up 20-year-old sermons from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, President Obama’s controversial former pastor. The details are contained in a document titled “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama,” commissioned by billionaire Joe Ricketts—the founder of TD Ameritrade, owner of the Chicago Cubs, and primary bankroller of a conservative Super PAC. In the proposal, leaked last week to The New York Times, several former McCain advisers recommend that Ricketts fund a $10 million ad campaign to remind voters that Wright once thundered “God damn America!” from his Chicago pulpit, and blamed 9/11 on U.S. meddling in the Mideast. The proposal was scrapped when it became public, said William Saletan in Slate.com, and Mitt Romney disavowed it, but it nonetheless offers “an instructive psychiatric portrait of the rage in Romney’s party.” The plan’s conservative authors express amazement that most voters “still aren’t ready to hate this president.” But they promise that if Ricketts pays them “to do exactly what John McCain would not let us do,” they’ll convince swing voters that Obama is a Wright acolyte who secretly hates white people and America itself.

Wright is an entirely legitimate issue, said Henry D’Andrea in The Washington Times. We’ve already seen the media manufacture a mini-scandal out of Romney’s high school hijinks back in 1965. So even if Romney won’t do it, why shouldn’t Republicans make an issue of the man who officiated at Obama’s wedding, baptized his daughters, and preached to the future president for some 20 years?

It’s true that Obama has paid no price for tolerating Wright’s “disgusting views,” said John Podhoretz in the New York Post. But it would be “senseless and even stupid” to focus on something that went on prior to 2008, when “Obama’s actual presidency” has provided so many damning reasons to deny him a second term. His failure to revive the economy is the issue; portraying Obama as a “Leftist-Marxist-Islamist laboratory experiment” is a distraction. Attempts to convince voters that Obama is a scary black man didn’t work in 2008, said Lincoln Mitchell in HuffingtonPost.com, and they’ll be even less effective now that voters have spent nearly four years getting to know—and like—Obama as an eminently decent man. Sooner or later, though, some loose cannon like Ricketts will spend millions trying to prove that Obama “would never have become president if Americans knew the ‘truth’ about him.”

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Both campaigns, in fact, are very worried that some Super PAC will set off “a bomb,” said Alexander Burns in Politico.com. Neither candidate wants a dirty campaign, but now that any unhinged billionaire can spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, candidates “are not in control of their own destinies.” Between now and November, a Super PAC might fund a barrage of ads featuring Wright or some other race-based fear message; from the other side might come ads aggressively dissecting Romney’s Mormon beliefs. Sadly, such mud-slinging could “steer the narrative of the election,” said Doug Schoen in Forbes.com. We should be choosing our next president based on competing visions for the nation’s future, but when “the whims of rich extremists” can flood the airwaves with bile, our democracy is cheapened. Don’t be surprised if a Super PAC “drags the entire election into the mire.”