Jeremiah Wright Is Here to Stay

In May, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright appeared resurrected from the ashes of the 2008 campaign. There was an uproar after The New York Times broke the story that a super PAC had proposed commercials associating President Obama with controversial comments made by his former pastor. Mitt Romney asked for the ads not to run, Karl Rove pronounced the plan stupid, and the advertising campaign’s funder, Joe Ricketts, publicly rejected the plan. The proposed ads were pulled (for now) from the air. And yet, the themes of the ads will not disappear; they have remained a staple of conservative talk radio and television nearly every day since the previous election, and millions of voters remain convinced that the president is really not an “American.” Moreover, the term “black liberation theology” gets put in “scare quotes” in articles (as in the aforementioned Times piece). Jeremiah Wright himself may not become the bogeyman star of this election, but the issues raised by his legacy will remain very much with us.