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Though Wills’s essay ran in the May 1 issue of the New York Review of Books he wrote it several days before Wright made his notorious appearance at the National Press Club. Yet it’s not diminished in the least by subsequent events — by which I mean not merely what Wright said about Obama and Obama said about Wright but also what the press then said about both of them. Which came in a deluge. In addition to the editorial in Wednesday’s Tribune there were columns by John Kass, Clarence Page, and Kathleen Parker. In the Sun-Times, which had published its editorial Tuesday, columnists Mark Brown, Mary Mitchell, Lynn Sweet, Richard Roeper, Neil Steinberg, and Carol Marin weighed in. It was a little like 9/11 — if you couldn’t think of anything to write about Wright and Obama you didn’t belong in the game.
Intrigue makes good reading and might sway some votes. At this stage health plans and energy plans probably won’t. Yes, I know, pundits like to argue otherwise, but the media have been kicking those tires for months now and they’ve gone flat. The most damned event of this endless campaign season was the debate in Philadelphia April 16, which hit bottom when the audience started jeering one of the moderators, ABC’s Charles Gibson. The Times‘s Frank Rich commented afterward, “Viewers of all political persuasions were affronted by the moderators’ failure to ask about the mortgage crisis, health care, the environment, torture, education, China policy, the pending G.I. bill to aid veterans, or the war we’re losing in Afghanistan,” instead, dishing up Wright, fantasy gunfire in Bosnia, commercials, and network promos. Rich argued that ABC had “tapped into a larger national discontent with news media fatuousness,” offering as evidence the fact that despite the “orgy of press hysteria” over Obama’s hypothesis about “bitter” small-towners who “cling to guns or religion,” the public did not care — “the polls hardly budged.” (Now a poll has, though it doesn’t so much measure Obama’s strength as it does how the public perceives his strength.)
