When Steve Sailer wondered back in January if the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. was trying to submarine Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, I could see his logic, but I thought it was a classic case of logic subverting reason. When Michael Barone wondered the same thing a month ago, building on Sailer’s argument, I started to consider the idea, because Barone’s just too good an observer to dismiss—but still, the idea seemed crazy. Occam’s Razor seemed to suggest that the Rev. Dr. Wright was saying and doing the things he was saying and doing not out of any ulterior motive, but simply because this is who he is; this is what he preaches because this is what he believes. (He also believes, it appears, that black folks and white folks have different brains, which is a bit of racist crackpottery I’d normally expect out of the very KKK he attacks.) He might have been damaging Sen. Obama’s campaign, but it didn’t seem necessary to conclude he was doing so intentionally.After the Rev. Dr. Wright’s media offensive this past weekend, however (I use the term advisedly), I’m not at all so sure. Marc Ambinder says that “Wright is throwing Obama under the bus” (an ironic return for Sen. Obama’s attempt to save his pastor by throwing Granny under the bus), while Clive Crook, Dana Milbank and Joe Klein have now come to the same conclusion as Sailer and Barone. Indeed, Klein takes it a step further:

Wright’s purpose now seems quite clear: to aggrandize himself—the guy is going to be a go-to mainstream media source for racial extremist spew, the next iteration of Al Sharpton—and destroy Barack Obama.

Certainly it’s hard to come to any other conclusion than that the Rev. Dr. Wright deliberately “reignited a controversy about race from which Obama had only recently recovered—and added lighter fuel.” Some people are even wondering now if the Clintons put him up to it.The sad thing is, it may very well work—and I do truly believe it will be a sad, sad day for this country if it does. Granted, I had no intention whatsoever of voting for Sen. Obama, but I wanted to believe in his integrity and his vision even if I can’t accept his political ideas; I wanted to believe that win or lose, he could help America take another step or two away from the racism of the past. Now, after all we’ve seen of his friends, his view of the people of this country (which echoes his wife’s bitterness at America) and the way he plays politics, I can’t respect him anymore, and I definitely want him to lose on his merits. That said, if 15% of the electorate votes for John McCain simply because Barack Obama has dark skin, as some sharp observers think will happen, that would be a shameful thing, and I don’t want to see that. But that’s where the Rev. Dr. Wright is heading us—that’s where he’s driving the bus—and it seems, increasingly, that he’s doing so because he’d rather inflame and exacerbate our nation’s internal divisions than be proved wrong about them. If so, that’s despicable. Barack Obama should have exercised much better care in his choice of friends; he shouldn’t have wasted his time on a pastor who could betray him (and his country) like that.

So Barack Obama is now looking to turn his back on public campaign financing in favor of a “parallel public financing system”—which is to say, on the same old way of raising money; and why not, really, when he can spend a day hobnobbing with billionaires and raise $3 million. The thing is, though, given some of the things Sen. Obama has said in the past, that starts to look more than a little like rank hypocrisy; as Zombie contends,

Michelle Obama (and other Obama campaign spokespeople) aren’t telling the truth. It seems that a signficant portion of Obama’s monthly campaign contributions are coming from “large donors”—i.e. rich people, not just the “$20 to $50” donations they’re constantly bragging about. . . . The single most insidious aspect of American politics is that candidates often must pander to and do the bidding of the wealthiest Americans, who have the funds to get the candidate elected. It’s so commonplace, we no longer think of it as “corruption,” but that’s basically what it is. So when Obama spends all day doing nothing but going to a series of private fundraisers populated exclusively by the wealthy, the only “change” I feel are the coins jangling at the bottom of my pocket.And I don’t like hypocrisy.

Neither do I; which is why, when you combine this with the evidence that Sen. Obama is, in the end, just another Chicago machine politician, I’m coming to the point where I agree with Peter Wehner:

Early on in this campaign I was impressed with Barack Obama as a thoughtful, inspiring, and admirable (if far too liberal) political figure. As the months have worn on, it’s become increasingly apparent that the candidate is projecting mere shadows on the wall. Our Republic deserves better.

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, a lot of them—like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they’ve gone through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, and they cling to guns, or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

So says Barack Obama, as of April 6 in San Francisco, in an astoundingly condescending moment which demeans many Americans on multiple levels; and in defending himself, his response has essentially been, “Why all the furor? All I did was say what everyone knows is true.” Paging Thomas Frank . . .To this, Hillary Clinton responds,

You know, Americans who believe in the Second Amendment believe it’s a matter of Constitutional rights. Americans who believe in God believe it is a matter of personal faith. Americans who believe in protecting good American jobs believe it is a matter of the American Dream. . . The people of faith I know don’t “cling to” religion because they’re bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich. Our faith is the faith of our parents and our grandparents. It is a fundamental expression of who we are and what we believe.

And,

I saw in the media it’s being reported that my opponent said that the people of Pennsylvania who faced hard times are bitter. Well, that’s not my experience. As I travel around Pennsylvania, I meet people who are resilient, who are optimistic, who are positive, who are rolling up their sleeves. They are working hard every day for a better future, for themselves and their children. Pennsylvanians don’t need a president who looks down on them; they need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them, who works hard for your futures, your jobs, your families.

On Commentary‘s “Contentions” blog, Jennifer Rubin called that first comment “probably the smartest thing she’s said in her entire political career”; I think Rubin is right. Of course, John McCain’s campaign is on top of this as well, as witness this quote from one of his advisors:

It shows an elitism and condescension towards hardworking Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking. It is hard to imagine someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans.

The theme is clear here: Sen. Obama is an out-of-touch ivory-tower elitist snob who looks down on ordinary folks. As David Paul Kuhn put it,

Last year [Sen. Obama] responded to an Iowa farmer’s concerns about crop prices by asking if “anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” There are no Whole Foods in Iowa. Recently Obama tried to bowl in Pennsylvania and looked like the sort of Democrat who thinks of Whole Foods when discussing crop prices. Now Obama talks about what drives rural voters’ cultural concerns and ends up looking like the kind of Democrat who bowls a 37 in seven frames. Soon there is a storyline. The silly is now serious.It seems that every time Obama makes a mistake he brings it up again, offers context, laughs about it, and then defends it. No matter, the bowling and arugula mistakes were still small time. But the bitter remark was a game changer.

Unfortunately for the Obama campaign, this is a theme that reminds a lot of folks of the Jeremiah Wright diatribes against America and Michelle Obama’s “the first time I’ve ever been proud of my country” comment; it seems to fit with them all too well. The question is, is this his helmet-in-a-tank moment? Certainly it looks like it might be in Pennsylvania; and while it’s too early to tell for the long term, you can be sure that if Sen. Obama manages to hang on and win the nomination, we’ll be hearing a lot about this from now to November. Sen. Obama shot himself in the foot good and proper; now he’d best just hope he doesn’t get gangrene.