The Democratic Party: Stealing Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

You might recall the charge of 'stove-pipe thinking' against our intelligence community in the wake of the absence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.  Although it was a legitimate charge, it's often the case that the same level of harsh scrutiny fails to obtain in other political arenas.  Indeed, a combination of subtle political blind spots and disincentives to venture beyond the scope of their comfort zones, effectively ensures that they won't be confronted with the charges of intellectual group-speak they routinely lodge against political enemies.

On Meet the Press, viewers were treated to just such a display.  The discussion turned to Reverend Wight, and Gwen Eiffel, a PBS political analyst and daughter of a preacher, was asked about the political dimensions of the debacle.  She began by noting that racism remains a problem in America, that people probably do make voting decisions based on race.  What was stunning is that at no time in her discussion did she mention that it was Reverend Wright who was racist, and none of the other panel members or moderator Tim Russert grasped the egregiousness of her oversight.

Russert played a snippet of Reverend Wright's response to Bill Moyers concerning Obama's criticisms of some of Wright's historical comments.  Wright said that Obama is a politician, and that he's a pastor.  Well, that's all it took for Eiffel to continue her 'stove-pipe' thinking by asserting, in an obtuse justification for Obama's two-decade association with him, that, yes, he is, indeed a politician.

But, what about Wright's assertions that he argued were taken out of context?  Indeed, what kind of context could justify Wright's statement that American "white people" deliberately introduced the AIDS virus into the black community?  That, of course, the likes of Russert and his cabal of tunnel-vision analysts, never thought about asking.

This is a serious problem for the Obama campaign--and, to a degree, for Clinton as well.  But it's only compounded when it doesn't register with the cream of the Washington editorial crop.  Moreover, it dovetails perfectly with Obama's gaff in San Francisco about rural white Pennsylvania voters "clinging" to "guns and religion" out of "bitterness."

Combined with Howard Dean's comment on the same show that 70 percent of Americans want us to leave Iraq--which is true only if you exclude the second part of the question:  What if it causes genocide in Iraq and a power vacuum in the region which Iran would fill?--then the percent drops to below 50 percent.

All of this is favorably positioning Senator McCain in ways no one thought possible just a few months ago.  His candor on the stump, command of the issues, and three decades of experience at the national level, may well carry the day.  Either way, the Democratic Party has some serious work ahead of itself if it doesn't want to, once again, steel defeat from the jaws of victory.