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Posted by John

Since the national discovery of Rev. Jeremiah Wright four years ago, Obama supporters have constantly expressed indignation over their opponents invoking the alarming connection between the two as a talking point. This week, the Romney campaign capitulated by claiming that it would not invoke Wright in campaign ads, instead choosing to focus entirely on current political issues.

The most important place where the Romney camp goes wrong is in failing to notice that a politician’s past political connections and his present policies can be intimately connected. To dredge up Obama’s (rather recent) connection to Rev. Wright is not to bring up something irrelevant, but to investigate into what it is that fuels the president’s decision-making. While we rightly respect politicians’ personal religious beliefs, most all of Rev. Wright’s controversial comments have little to do with religion and are fundamentally political.

This vital point seemed to slip by the intellectual filter of CNN anchor Roland Martin, in his claim that if the Romney campaign were to attack Obama based on his connection to Wright, attacking Romney for his Mormon faith should be “on the table” for the Obama campaign[i]. Martin’s claim would be parroted later by Martin Bashir at MSNBC, as it began to make its rounds through the mainstream media[ii]. The point is already ridiculous in claiming that for one side of the debate to attack a single religious practitioner opens up an entire religion to smearing on the other side. We forget, though, that the motivation for criticizing Obama for his connection to Wright has been anything but religion. The Romney campaign needs to bring back Rev. Wright to emphasize his political significance, which was the main source of concern to begin with. In refusing to address the issue of Rev. Wright in the campaign, Romney is surrendering a valuable and important political issue for no reason at all except a self-defeating sense of ‘decency.’ After a brutal week in which the Obama campaign ripped Romney for the bankruptcy of client companies of Bain Capital years after he was even there, Romney seems not to realize that the only thing off the table for the Obama campaign’s advertising seems to be decency itself.

The questions over Obama’s connection to Wright are far from indecent – they are very important, and still largely unanswered. I know that for my part, hearing my preacher shout any of what we hear from Wright in the viral TV clips would have sent me running for the church door, and warranted a quick furious post on Party Hard Politics. Why did such anti-American vitriol not warrant a similar reaction from the President? Such questions are the stuff of great campaign ads – great campaign ads that we apparently will not be seeing from the Romney camp.

And, digressing, for the other half of Roland Martin’s claim, a recent study from the Brookings Institution seems to show that attacking Romney based on his Mormonism may not be such an effective tactic after all[iii]. In the poll conducted, many conservative voters, including even evangelical Christian voters, tended to think even more highly of Romney after hearing a summary of some major tenets of his faith.

Still, in the end, it is disingenuous to equate attacking one politician based on his connection with a politically radical religious figure with attacking another based only on his religion, one practiced by millions of Americans. Roland Martin’s remark, which the Obama campaign would undoubtedly endorse, seeks to do one thing – to shut the Romney campaign up over a very concerning issue. So far, the campaign has taken the bait.