Well, the eve of the politics of personal destruction, at least.
In a recent post, Walter Russell Mead has a photo taken from Wikipedia, that a snapshot of a fascinating moment before a long internecine struggle on the American left that would eventually have key implications for the rest of the world. In a way, it’s reminiscent of the relatives of Queen Victoria more or less happily meeting a few years before plunging Europe into World War I.
The above photo shows the now infamous Rev. Jeremiah Wright and President Clinton, both wearing sober, expensive business suits, and taken at the 1998 White House Prayer Breakfast.
Three years later, Wright would have this to say immediately after another September 11th, as ABC reported:
“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.
“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” he told his congregation.
Sen. Obama told the New York Times he was not at the church on the day of Rev. Wright’s 9/11 sermon. “The violence of 9/11 was inexcusable and without justification,” Obama said in a recent interview. “It sounds like he was trying to be provocative,” Obama told the paper.
Well, that’s one way to put it. And of course, Wright would eventually add:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnlRrxXv-v8[/youtube]
Gosh, that’s rather “provocative” as well. Adding to all of that conversational provocativeness in President Obama’s former church, an associate of Wright would say this in 2008 about a former first lady:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg4P6dLFUkQ[/youtube]
Of course, during that period, if John Heliemann and Mark Halperin’s 2010 book Game Change is to be believed, the former president would have this to say about his would-be successor, as this summary in the London Daily Mail highlights:
The former president allegedly claimed during the hard-fought Democratic primary race: ‘A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.’
He is said to have made the racist remark in a phone call entreating Senator Teddy Kennedy, the party’s vastly influential elder statesman, to endorse his wife, Hillary, in the delicately balanced 2008 nomination battle.
But the call so offended Senator Kennedy that it backfired and helped make up the veteran Washington power broker’s mind to throw his complete support behind Mr Obama’s historic bid for the White House, according to a new book.
