Obama's Achilles heel

Ross, writing off Mark Halperin's list of ways McCain can attack Obama that Hillary couldn't, makes a really smart point:

Any successful political attack needs to have some sort of valence - it can push all sorts of atavistic buttons, but ultimately it needs to go to an issue, or it needs to go to the opposing candidate's character. The Willie Horton commercials wouldn't have worked if they were just about Willie Horton's race; they worked because they were ultimately about Michael Dukakis's handling of criminal justice. Same with the (in)famous "white hands" ad that Jesse Helms ran against Harvey Gantt: Yes, it arguably played the race card, but it also hit Gantt on a hot-button policy issue, affirmative action, and linked his positions, by implication, to blue-collar economic anxieties. The GOP attacks on Al Gore and John Kerry, meanwhile - as a phony and a flip-flopper, respectively - worked because they painted both men as characterologically unfit to be President.

Now I'm sure McCain can find ways to attack Obama on issues, and I'm sure he can find ways to hit him on character. And there's probably a way to turn Obama's internationalism against him in a very general way, using his "world man" reputation as a foil to highlight McCain's more nationalistic persona. But I don't see how McCain could plausibly weave the race card or the Islam card into his attacks without coming off like both a bigot and a fool.

Ross is right about the Islam card, but I think it wouldn't be hard to plausibly bring up race in the campaign by raising the whole Jeremiah Wright question. We've talked before here about Wright's racialism, which is what the Chicago pastor has built his theology around. Obama has kinda sorta distanced himself from it, but he's left it murky. And unsurprisingly so: Obama has identified Wright as his spiritual mentor. What is it about Wright's theological and moral vision that Obama identifies with -- and, more importantly, why does he find the racialist stuff he presumably disagrees with insufficiently objectionable to cause him to find another church?

The deeper valence here, I would suggest, is that Barack Obama is benefiting from a racial double standard -- one that is present in other areas of public life. In other words, the Rev. Wright problem is not really about the Rev. Wright, but about whether Barack Obama is being given a special pass because of his race. Let's be honest: no white candidate could be involved with a church that gave a lifetime achievement award named for its pastor to a man, Louis Farrakhan, who has called Judaism a "gutter religion," and called people of other races "devils," and not face a hellacious media firestorm. Nor should such a white candidate be given a free pass. Republican candidates have been criticized for speaking at the fundamentalist Bob Jones University, which is associated with racist practices (they won't allow interracial dating) and with strident anti-Catholicism. But no Republican candidate has ever identified Bob Jones Jr. or Bob Jones III a spiritual mentor.

I think it's absolutely fair to make an issue of this, especially because Obama positions himself as an irenic figure. Perhaps Obama has good answers to these questions, in which case, fine. But he should give them.

If McCain did want to go down this path, he would talk in some fashion about the importance of national unity, and having one standard for everybody, about the evil of racial and religious bigotry. All these are to some extent Obama themes, and it would be audacious, and legit, for McCain to put Obama on the defensive by bringing up his separatist church.

Michelle Obama told the Wall Street Journal the other day:

Her role, Mrs. Obama says, "is to give people yet another slice of who Barack is, making him even more multidimensional," because people picking a president "want to know not just about policies...but who are you? What do you believe in? Can I trust you?"

Many white voters are drawn to Obama in part because they think he can do something about healing the racial divide in this country. That, to me, is one of the best reasons to vote for him. But Obama's deep personal connection to the Rev. Wright challenges that assumption, and makes people wonder who Obama really is, and what he really believes in -- and whether or not he can stand up to racialist demagogues and special-pleaders. That's an angle of attack Republicans could legitimately undertake, if they did it with care.