I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I do have a significantly different take on Reverend Jeremiah Wright than those currently being disseminated on cable-TV and mainstream news media. Pastor Wright is nobody's fool, and his media tour, including Bill Moyer's Journal and the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., involves a shrewd calculation to help his congregant, Barack Obama.
Any pastor is immersed in the watchword of Christianity, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and if Reverend Wright thought the publicity generated by his media tour would hurt Senator Obama, he never would have undertaken it. He knows that he is dredging up an issue that was fading away, and as a Christian, he would have willingly suffered persecution and mis-representation for the sake of someone else, as that is the model Jesus left for us.
No, Pastor Wright made a conscious decision to unfreeze the current situation, albeit without Senator Obama's coordination. The loop of his anti-American snippets had become embedded in our collective consciousness, and Mr. Obama was firmly linked to it. By re-opening the issue, and making more outrageous statements in the process, Revered Wright showed how helpless the Obama campaign was to control his actions. This effectively unlinked his congregant from the 30-second excerpts, and though it may cause some additional short-term damage to Senator Obama, in the long run, it will do him a world of good.
At the same time, of course, Pastor Wright is defending himself, but he would never sacrifice the possibility of the first black President for his own reputation. Just ponder the situation. Reverend Wright has been a public figure in the church for years, and his community outreach is widely acclaimed. He has been following the political debate as closely as anyone, and the most logical explanation for his behavior involves self-sacrifice not aggrandizement.
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- Willy Gissen
- In 2003, Willy Gissen founded Cut-It-Out Communications, a full-service public relations agency based in Hartsdale, New York. His organization specializes in the incorporation of online activities into traditional public relations programs, primarily for business-to-business clients.
These activities include the creation of e-newsletters, the set up and maintenance of internal blogs, and the development of inbound links to maximize a client’s search engine ranking.
See his other articles at public relations instruction, and visit his other blog, New York Times Leader, for an analysis of each morning's lead story.