The Rev. Wright Connection Still Haunts Obama By Michael Barone
The Bear on May 28 2008 at 8:28 am | Filed under: Election 08’
As Barack Obama makes his slow but steady way toward the Democratic nomination, the assumption in the admiring precincts of the press corps is that voters have dismissed as irrelevant his longtime association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But that may prove as mistaken as the assumption, back in 1988, that voters would not be impressed by Michael Dukakis’s 11-year support of a law granting weekend furloughs to convicts sentenced to life without parole, an issue brought up in the primaries by Al Gore but largely ignored in press coverage at the time.
Evidence for this comes in the exit polls from the West Virginia and Kentucky primaries on May 13 and 20. In both, about half the voters—and these are voters in the Democratic primary—said that they believe Obama shares Wright’s views either somewhat or a lot. And slightly under 50 percent of these voters said that Obama is honest and trustworthy.
To be sure, these were primaries in which Obama was beaten, and beaten badly, by Hillary Clinton—67 percent to 26 percent in West Virginia, 66 percent to 30 percent in Kentucky. So they would be inclined, one might believe, to think ill of Obama. Yet it is not universally the case that voters who choose one candidate in a hotly contested election doubt whether the other candidate is honest. You can oppose someone who you believe to be trustworthy. Only 38 percent of Americans voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and George McGovern in 1972. But probably a higher percentage believed that they were basically honest.
Which leads me to ask why these voters declined to say Obama is honest. When have they seen him lie or being caught in a lie?
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