Rod says:

But Jeremiah Wright is not just any far-out left-wing minister. He is Obama’s spiritual mentor, and has been for a long time. As we’ve learned from Obama’s biographical details, young Obama was lost and searching for an identity. His father had abandoned him, and he wasn’t sure where and how he fit in to the black community. He found a father figure in Wright and a connection to the black community in Wright’s church. The degree of separation between Obama and Wright, versus McCain and Hagee, is far less.

First, a few things should be stated clearly about Hagee and McCain.  This is supposed to be a free country, and Hagee is free to express his dreadful views, as is Wright, and I am exceedingly tired of the hunt to shut people out of political discourse because they or people they associate with do not toe this or that line.  Watching certain libertarians pathetically pursue mainstream “respectability” in the wake of the newsletters business with the Paul campaign was enough to make me ill.  These are the sorts of people who will abandon their most popular spokesman in over a generation so that they can retain “credibility” in the eyes of people who wish them dead.  Meanwhile, the thing that should really disturb people is the dangerous policies that Hagee, McCain and Obama have endorsed in the past in the Near East.  Bashing Catholics is distasteful and wrong, but Hagee has done far more concrete damage by lending his name and his influence to the excessive bombing of Lebanon. 

Also, there is such a thing as loyalty, and one of the best things that can be said about Obama is that he seems to understand that loyalty entails keeping faith with friends and colleagues after it has become politically dangerous to do so.  A lot of people give his church grief for preaching against an aspirational “middle-classness,” and I understand the objections to this view, but at its core this view entails a call to solidarity with your community and a willingness to remain loyal to that community even though better opportunities may beckon beyond the horizon.   

Obama really shouldn’t have to answer for what Wright says, but I also think that his loyalty to Wright should not be an occasion for bashing the man.  There are plenty of things in his record, or the lack thereof, that provide reasons to find fault with Obama.  Despite the manifest unfairness about the way that the Paul campaign was treated over statements in decades-old newsletters that were objectively far less offensive than things Wright has said in very recent memory, especially when compared to the pass Obama has received and continues to receive from the media, and despite the profoundly dishonest double standard applied to Paul and Obama, I am not interested in criticising Obama along these lines.  Obviously, I don’t share Wright’s views, and Obama claims not to share all of them, but I have to ask seriously what kind of man Obama would be if he disowned his spiritual father for the sake of the approval of others (who may not give their approval even if he did what is being demanded).  No one that I would want to entrust with any office of importance, that’s for sure.

That is the real difference between Obama’s modest distancing of himself from Wright and McCain’s embarrassing embrace of Hagee.  McCain does not belong to Hagee’s congregation, he has no duties or obligations to him, and yet he welcomes Hagee’s support in the most cynical fashion.  We take McCain’s claim that he disagrees with Hagee’s dreadful views at face value, while he receives credit from Hagee’s endorsement as evidence that social conservatives and pro-Israel evangelicals have given him their seal of approval.  Hagee is absurdly accepted as a mainstream figure because he strikes the “right” pose on Israel policy, whatever his own reasons for doing so, while Wright receives opprobrium at least in part because he does not.  At the same time, Obama rejects Wright’s ludicrous and objectionable views, but for some reason he must go beyond that and publicly turn against the man who brought him into the church.  That strikes me as a deeply disturbing demand.  If Obama is to be judged by the far-left company he keeps, one need only peruse his voting record.

No doubt Obama would be better off politicaly, and it would help his career, if he dropped Wright like a stone, but he would be a far more respectable and decent man if he refused to throw his mentor under the bus to appease the media, his critics and even his admirers.  I still wouldn’t vote for him, but I could have some respect for him as someone with a degree of integrity.

Update: Obama has written a response to the controversy.

Second Update: Wright has left the campaign, and Obama appeared on MSNBC on Friday to address the matter.