My morning routine of MSNBC and coffee imported from Iowa is getting less and less tenable. Either it's a Hillary shill promoting some crazy math theory that puts her ahead (it won't be long until her campaign tries to bring back the 3/5 clause) or some conservative harping about Rev. Wright.
Today it was Wright himself making headlines by trying to explain his relationship to Louis Farrakhan at the National Press Club. Last week, he was on Bill Moyers making non-apology apologies and generally making sure he's still in the headlines. It's almost as if he wants to prove that an African-American can't be president by tearing down the one guy who could make it happen.
Perhaps this is all part of a brilliant plan to neutralize Rev. Wright. It's probably just another case of Democrats being unable to keep anyone on message, but what if the goal were to saturate coverage on Rev. Wright early enough in the year to be old by November but late enough in the primary process so as to not imperil Obama's nomination. The convention is still months away. By then, he's picked a VP nominee, given an acceptance speech that will be analyzed to death and spent weeks "bringing the party back together" as per the standard media narrative.
After the conventions, Republicans will try to bring back Wright, but by then, it'll be old news, just like Bill Clinton's philandering was when the Lewinsky scandal broke. After what seems like endless rehashing of the story, people will simply tire of it. Yes, yes, the average TV viewer says, we know that Obama had a nutty preacher back in Chicago.
If Wright is old, what's new? Anything about McCain, who has been tooling around the country in a series of mostly-ignored media events. Later on, when it really matters, people will start to hear about McCain's Bushite tax plan, his plans for endless occupation of Iraq, excused because he assumes (based on implausible comparisons to Germany and Japan) that there won't be any casualties for most of it and a general narrative that he's not the "maverick" we've seen him as after years of favorable media coverage.
Is this a brilliant grand scheme on the part of the Obama campaign? Probably not. But if it was, it's a ballsy bet that could either pay off big or fail miserably.
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