I don’t want to beat the Hagee/Wright theme to death, but Jim Antle’s post deserves a response.  Jim writes:

But Hagee’s marginal views probably aren’t going to influence McCain. His relatively mainstream views — broad social conservatism and sympathy for Israel, regardless of whatever baggage he may bring to both positions personally — will. Hagee’s views are a legitimate campaign issue, but there is no evidence McCain opposes abortion or is pro-Israel because of Hagee’s end times theology. Wright’s views, in the event that Obama actually shares them, are disqualifying on their face.

This is true, though I think saying that Hagee has “sympathy for Israel” tends to understate what Hagee’s policy views are and how strongly he holds them, and it is clear that McCain supports the same kind of hard-line military and security policies Hagee endorses because McCain generally just likes hard-line military and security policies.  The easier treatment of McCain comes from the greater familiarity with him: he is a known quantity, and we know that he has little time for religious arguments of any kind, so there is no temptation to read Hagee’s views into McCain’s.  Obama is not as well-defined, so whatever can be used to fill in the gaps will be used.  Indeed, the typical argument on McCain’s behalf is that everyone knows that he’s a militarist, so his association with like-minded people shouldn’t surprise us.  Leave aside whether these views are themselves actually appalling (they are)–they are old news, so there’s no reason to dwell on them.  That seems to be what many people are saying.  

If his disdain for evangelical leaders is anything like what it used to be, McCain probably laughs at Hagee in private.  My larger problem with the way most of the coverage of McCain’s embrace of Hagee is that something like Hagee’s full-throated support of bombing Lebanon (which is just the most prominent of his belligerent utterances) escapes censure, despite the fact that this strikes me as a far more morally troubling and dangerous kind of view.  There actually is a difference between railing against injustices, insanely imaginary or not, and glorying in bloodshed, and it’s a very odd situation where the latter is considered the less controversial thing.  The former may be self-defeating, absurd and ignorant, but it doesn’t endorse injustices in war and treat them as wondrous.  In short, I suppose what really troubles me is that Hagee is regarded as an acceptable and “mainstream” figure not in spite of his dangerous and extreme views as they relate to foreign policy, but precisely because of those views, such that these views can be described without irony as “mainstream.”  The controversy about Hagee, to the extent that there has been that much, pertains mostly to his sectarianism, which gives priority to the wrong thing. 

As for Wright, there’s no question that he has had a significant influence on Obama, while McCain has no personal ties to Hagee.  It would not be difficult to imagine that Obama holds views that are far to the left of most Americans, and it is likely that these views are brimming with resentment and with what a broad swathe of the middle and right of the spectrum would deem “anti-Americanism,” and yet he might still not be so far to the left that he shares the views that Wright expressed in those videos.  That is, Obama could be telling the truth about his rejection of these statements, and could at the same time have embraced views that he regards as reasonable and moderate in comparison that would nonetheless seem barking mad to the majority of voters.  But to pursue this line of inquiry would involve focusing on Obama’s own actual leftism, rather than trying to tie him to his pastor’s statements.  The Wright business can be a useful episode if it becomes an occasion to look at what Obama actually does believe that puts him far to the left, but the extent and content of his leftism can’t be assumed simply through the words of his mentor, and insofar as the focus on Wright is aimed at putting the pastor’s words in Obama’s mouth or engaging in a lot of sloppy “must have” reasoning, as in “he must have picked up his pastor’s ideas about this,” it is misguided.

Besides, what do we take away from these stories?  The lesson of the Hagee-McCain story is that McCain favours militaristic policies in the Near East, which is not exactly news but should serve as a reminder of the dangers of a McCain administration.  The lesson of the Wright story, such as it is, is that Obama travels in far-left circles and was influenced by people on the far left, which is no more newsworthy than the other story and, for those who have followed the campaign, perhaps less so.  I take the point that there are many people, exposed as they have been to the glowing media portrayal of Obama to date, who are less familiar with this information who are going to be surprised by this “revelation,” but what this means is that poorly-informed voters who were being poorly served by the media were introduced to the reality that Obama really is a big leftist and would have been one had Jeremiah Wright never made any of the statements in the now-infamous videos.  I grant you that this is politically significant, and because it potentially represents a radical reevaluation of the candidate by many of the people, Republicans and independents, who have formed part of his coalition it is worth covering extensively.  Even so, I detect an imbalance in the response to these stories: the Wright story is clearly being pushed because the mainstream media are now overreacting to their embarrassingly biased coverage of Obama’s campaign, and so having ignored Obama’s leftist record for 14 months they are latching on to the story about Wright.  There may be a second lesson to the story: campaigns that live substantially by rhetoric are uniquely vulnerable to being undone by association with the rhetoric of supporters.