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I can see potential damage ensuing from this exchange; largely because the general public is not open-minded enough to discern Wright's real motivation behind this interview. I suspect that this interview was more of an attempt to offer further distance between Obama and himself. Seeing how guilty Obama has been labled because association with Wright, Wright is trying to point out how their "different worlds" don't coincide in ways that the general public seem to think.
That's my theory anyway...
Dre, how I hope you are correct! :) But, if that is Wright's goal then he picked a very clumsy and well-veiled way to help.LOL
If I'm wrong on this one and I'm giving Wright too much credit, maybe I'm the one who's misguided; and not the general public. :)
Just going from the provided excerpts, Wright said exactly what I would have thought he would have said - Obama's a politician who speaks to his audience just as Wright speaks to his. Unless there was a good deal of yelling during the interview, it seemed a clear and articulate way to describe Obama's reaction to the soundbytes.
Personally, I think that politicians in general need to be metaphorically 'thrown under the bus.' To paraphrase - anywone who wants the job of president probably doesn't deserve it.
My wife and I saw the interview and we both looked at each other a said, "the man is telling the truth." It seems Bill Moyers is in the same church orginization with Rev, Wright, so this was a highly orginized PR tactic to help deflect the craziness.
Rev. Wright said that he and Senator Obama talk to two different worlds and they truly do. I didn't see him throwing our next president under the bus, he was just clarifing the points. I was glad to see Moyers run the full context of each comment to let viewers see the "whole" parts of the targeted comments and not only the "small" parts the stupid Media wanted you too see.
Overall, America saw a truly wise man, not the crazied nut the Media tried to make him look like.
And while I could see people taking this out of the original context as if Wright was framing "politician" as a wholly negative thing, I didn't really experience it that way; I experienced it as "people in differing social positions inevitably end up having to speak in ways that won't work in other social positions, and language is often imperfect. We have to do our jobs the best way we know how, using the language that will best work for us."
I'm not SURE that's how I would have wanted him to answer the question, as an Obama supporter, because "politician" is a kind of smear in our basically apolitical culture, but I did feel that Wright's responses across the board demonstrated genuine integrity and a deep, caring thoughtfulness that I was simply awed by--I don't recall seeing its like on TV in a long time, maybe never.
I don't get this comment--a highly organized PR tactic by whom, precisely? The implication seems to be that their church was behind this? Or the Obama campaign? Or Wright himself seeking to use Moyers as his PR tool?
Bill Moyers is an independent journalist whose integrity is, from my experience watching him over the years, pretty impeccable. I am sure that he sought out Wright for his program, not because he wanted to do some PR spin, but because he believed Wright had more to say. It's ludicrous to imagine that Moyers was acting somehow as the "tool" of either Wright, Obama, or the Church, in soliciting this interview.
And the interview itself took on the issues so fairly and directly, that I can see absolutely no basis for implying it was manipulative. Particularly by contrast to the rest of the media coverage of this entire issue, which has been a highly powerful, organized PR tactic for continued racist miseducation.
There had to be a good place for Rev. Wright to explain his side of the story. I think the perfect place was Bill Moyers, I also feel he is a very good journalist and PBS has been good with this election confusion. I am not saying this was put on to be manipulative, but to be a fair platform for Rev. Wright.