Republicans not disuaded by Obama speech

Jonathon Martin:

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Now, with the emergence of the notorious video showing the Rev. Jeremiah Wright damning the country, criticizing Israel, faulting U.S. policy for the Sept. 11 attacks and generally lashing out against white America, GOP strategists believe they’ve finally found an antidote to Obamamania.

In their view, the inflammatory sermons by Obama’s pastor offer the party a pathway to victory if Obama emerges as the Democratic nominee. Not only will the video clips enable some elements of the party to define him as unpatriotic, they will also serve as a powerful motivating force for the conservative base.

In fact, the video trove has convinced some that, after months of praying for Hillary Clinton and the automatic enmity which she arouses, that they may actually have easier prey.

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Even Obama’s much-lauded Tuesday speech, which detailed his relationship with his church and focused on the issue of racial reconciliation, failed to shake the notion that Republicans had been given a rare political gift.

“It was a speech written to mau-mau the New York Times editorial board, the network production people and the media into submission. Beautifully calibrated but deeply dishonest,” said GOP media consultant Rick Wilson, who crafted the 2002 ad tying then-Sen. Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden. “Not good enough.”

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With Michelle Obama’s comments last month that she was, thanks to her husband’s candidacy, for the first time “really proud of [her country],” the topic entered the more mainstream elements of the conservative conversation, ricocheting across talk radio, cable news and blogs.

“All the sudden you’ve got two dots, and two dots make a line,” said Castellanos. “You start getting some sense of who he is, and it’s not the Obama you thought. He’s not the Tiger Woods of politics.”

But if Michelle Obama’s gaffe caused some ripples in the right-wing pond, the Wright videos have detonated the equivalent of a daisy cutter on the conservative landscape, awakening an otherwise dispirited party base.

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Just as with John F. Kerry and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004, Republican strategists view the Wright flap as deeply damaging to Obama because it strikes at the message, or set of principles, at the heart of his candidacy.

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The articles talks about clips of Wright's sermons being put together in a rather heavy handed way with pictures of people doing black power salutes. There are more subtle ways of using the clips by interspersing portions of Obama's "just words" speech. Sean Hannity played such a clip today on his show.

While Obama may have mau-maued many in the media Michael Gersons response today was pretty devastating and I expect an even harsher assessment of the speech from Charles Krauthammer. On closer analysis many find it deeply dishonest. The controversy has also exposed the black liberation theology to the challenge it should have faced years ago. That is not going to go away.