One month ago, John McCain looked set to limp into the general election much like Bob Dole did 12 years ago, only at a much greater financial disadvantage and against a stronger candidate.
Then, just before the weekend, video surfaced of some of Barack Obama's spiritual advisor Jeremiah
Wright's best sermonizing, and the media unsurprisingly went to town. Wright's general message had hardly been a secret, but actually seeing him pronounce judgment on the country ("God damn America") and Barack Obama's rivals ("Hillary Clinton ain't never been called a nigger") connects on a gut level that merely reading about his exploits never approaches. Obama hardly helped his cause with an overly broad and frankly unbelievable denial — "the statements…were not statements I personally heard " — that has sent reporters trawling through archives to see if they could place Obama at the Trinity church during one of Wright's blame-America-fests.
Suddenly, McCain's general election strategy was written for him: Step 1) Allow the RNC and outside groups to play the Wright videos on an endless loop; step 2) sit back and take the occasional trip to Iraq; step 3) victory. It's hard to imagine how McCain or his supporters could have overplayed the inside straight they'd been dealt.
Leave it to Bill Kristol to overplay a strong hand, and embarrass everyone he's associated with in the process. Kristol's New York Times column today attempts to place Obama at the scene of a particularly noxious Wright sermon. It's a hell of a gotcha; the only problem is that it's blatantly false, as Marc Ambinder showed (given his 7:11 am timestamp) handily despite just having gotten out of bed. Kristol's error begins in describing the Newsmax.com writer, Ronald Kessler, from whom he'd gotten the non-scoop, as a "journalist." Even Kristol's lame correction, which essentially disembowels the whole piece, manages to describe a specimen of writing from Newsmax as a "report."
While it isn't exactly a shock that Kristol would launder fabrications from a sub-tabloid quality propaganda merchant through the Grey Lady, the fact that the Times couldn't be bothered to double-check Kristol, presumably in possession of some knowledge of what their newest hire considers journalism, is at least a mild surprise.
None of this is to deny that Obama really does have a problem, and has some questions to answer. Pace Josh Marshall, there is plenty of material in Wright's preaching "that doesn’t come out of the sermon tradition of African-American Christianity with a 60s twist." (Martin Luther King, for one, never said "God damn America," and there is hardly a better example of African-American Christianity with a 60s twist.) No, it isn't fair to tie Obama to Wright's beliefs — he plainly doesn't share them — but that hardly means that projecting Wright's sermons onto Obama won't be an effective tactic.
Still, the takeaway lesson from Kristol's goof applies broadly: Don't credulously buy into "reporting" at websites that routinely make things up, because they routinely makes things up. And if you're a scrivener hoping to damage Obama and you're prepared to bend the truth to do so, be sure that your fabrications can't be instantly exposed. Otherwise you might make the story about you rather than your quarry.
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