Adam C: 1) No, they did not coordinate. I will accept it as circumstantial evidence if Rev. Wright does not respond with a public event in the next week. But I suspect he will.
2) No, it is not fatal. It has taken Obama from “something new” to “same old thing.” He’s now Just Another Politician. But most years, just another politician wins. And this year, just another Democrat politician is favored. He can lose, but he’s still the most likely winner in November.
3) No, Obama will win NC big (10+) and Hillary will win IN small (1-5). Plus, NC is larger and since this is all an argument about popular vote, even equal percentages would mean Obama gains in the popular vote. All that said, Hillary will win net popular votes in the rest of the states (WV, KY, PR will swamp OR, MT, SD).
Thomas Crown: 1. I believe they did not coordinate, largely because I think Wright is trying to shame Obama into speaking what they both believe to be the truth.
2. It’s not fatal now. The fun part is what happens when non-D voters get to hear it again and again. And the best part is, Kitten isn’t even fully vetted yet. Just Another Politician takes what edge Kitten had against a man the media has spent the last eight years treating as being Sliced Bread: The Sequel. If he becomes Just Another Northern Liberal, which I think he will, he’s dead. We have the opportunity to truly transcend color this year by treating more-or-less black Barack Obama exactly the same as we treated Michael Dukakis.
Who needs a tank when the candidate is a treasure chest waiting to be opened?
Glorious.
3. I agree with Adam, and only disagree to note that Florida and Michigan are out there, waiting. Calling. Lurking. Ordering pizzas.
I love this country.
Paul Cella: 1. Doubtful, but not inconceivable.
2. Only if he fails to effect a separation from Wright sufficient to mollify guilt-stricken but somewhat annoyed moderate Liberals.
3. Yes — supposing, of course, that Clinton has the cynicism and savvy to leverage the Wright controversy against him.
Dan McLaughlin: Well, to offer up my own answers:
1. What Paul said. Maybe, but I don’t think Wright is the type to coordinate his own public denunciation.
2. I don’t think Obama’s fatally wounded yet, but the problem is that all this stuff taken together forms a coherent and very unpleasant narrative - Obama’s statements and close associations are all entirely consistent with a man who never heard a bad thing about America that he felt it necessary to disagree with. I just don’t think there’s anywhere near a majority of Americans who could picture themselves being friends with Bill Ayers, or nodding along in church with the kind of stuff Rev. Wright peddles. And that’s going to make people very uncomfortable with Obama, which is not at all the place he was two months ago.
3. I’m now thinking he’s going to lose Indiana handily and win NC narrowly, and it will be hard to spin that as a victory. I still can’t see the superdelegates abandoning him - I think they recognize that the long-term damage to the party from being seen as “robbing” the first credible African-American candidate of the nomination in a “backroom deal” would justify giving him the nomination even if they expect to lose. It would be wholly out of character for the Democratic party leadership to stand up to that sort of argument.
haystack: 1. no…but I bet they “chatted” about Barry planning to bail on his pastor after the trainwreck that was the NAACP speech…oh, to be a fly on the wall for THAT little chit-chat.
2. parsing the question…”if more doesn’t come out”, no. His fans consider the whole list of examples here as “us” just being mean and taking poor old Mr. Hope and Change out of context. Those that were wary are resolved to vote NO on Barry now, I think…but I can pretty much guarantee there will be more to come out. This cat has never been fully vetted. We have all the Bill years to beat up Hillary with-there has been almost NOTHING on his “community organizer” years…nothing juicy anyway, and besides…there’s blood in the water-ya think Hillary! is gonna just move on to the next campaign stop? pfffffft…I don’t. God but do I enjoy this 
3. I think Obama sees no appreciable difference thru the remaining primaries…Has this opened him up in the general for a full house of pain? Absolutement…IF, that is, our presumptive nominee decides to actually FIGHT to win the general of course…
Jeff Emanuel:
We have the opportunity to truly transcend color this year by treating more-or-less black Barack Obama exactly the same as we treated Michael Dukakis.
That was the best quote I’ve seen in a long, long time.
Soren Dayton: 1. A net loss is any loss in IN. The badness of the loss is proportional to the closness in NC. Or more to the point, the the more polarized the NC white vote is, the worse it is for him.
2. Too soon to tell on how much damage. The key tactical question will be how much this focuses on why he did it now and what did he know and when. It is not plausible that he is just finding out what a paranoid racist Wright is now. There is a tremendous message synergy between what Obama did today and Wright’s line about “Obama says what he says because he’s a politician”
Shooting the preacher is about political expedience, not belief.
3. The press allows BO to whitewash, so he may get by with a day or two. But that means he gets his first positive message out … Friday or Saturday. No good at all.
Moe Lane: In order:
1a). Tempting to think so, but it was too sloppy to be coordinated well. I can’t for the life of me see why he’d be hawking a DVD of the speech about how he can’t throw his pastor under the bus just before he throws a press conference announcing that he’s throwing his pastor under the bus. Unless he’s just dumb and/or nobody’s able to tell him things that he doesn’t want to hear any more. Which is very easily possible.
1b). Does this mean that he can cast aside his grandmother now, by the way?
2). No, but they’ll all collectively take the blame for what was and is always the real problem for Obama - which is that Americans do not elect peaceniks President. Democrats simply have to learn to accept that their candidates need to credibly sound like they’re both ready and eager to rip out our enemies’ veins with their teeth.
3). Clinton will win Indiana, and unless Obama wins by 20 points the story will be about how his support cratered in the last week of the campaign. I’m going to guess that he’s going to end up around +10, which will do bupkis for him with the super-delegates. If he wins by only 4 points or so, he’s got problems. If he ties or loses - which I do not see happening - then roughly half of the Left ’sphere should start seriously considering either fleeing the country, or supporting John McCain in the general.
Mark Kilmer: 1. No, they did not coordinate; the idea is far too risky, and the execution beyond clumsy.
2. It won’t stop his trip to the nomination, but Barry’s going to be hammered relentless from now-’til-November. And afterwards, as we do our post-mortems on the end of “another brilliant career.”
3. Nope. I think African American voters in NC will rally behind Barry in his “hour of need,” and he’ll win big. I don’t think she’ll win Indiana by anything resembling double-digits, and he might just pull another Iowa. Either way, their contest has been all over been the continued bleeding since February.
Dan Spencer: 1. I can’t believe there was any conspiracy to coordinate Wright’s resurrection.
2. There is enough stuff out there to paint Obama’s “blank screen” as the extremist liberal/progressive he is. Obama’s throwing Wright today, would have been much more believable if it had been said six weeks ago. Now, wink, wink, as Wright told the National Press Club on Monday, it sounds simply like the expedient politics it is.The Wright stuff took off because there was the video and the admittedly Obamania suffering mainstream media wasn’t able to spin any effective denial of just how extreme Wright is. Obama’s bomber, the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers still hasn’t grabbed the public’s attention because there is no Wright-like smoking gun videos. If Obama can eventually be tied to the unrepentant terrorist as he has been tied to Wright, well, with the patriotism issued raised by Mrs. Obama, the flag pin etc., I can’t see him defeating McCain.
3. As for Indiana and North Carolina, Obama will suffer a net loss. There are now some willing to predict that Hillary will win both primaries. With Hillary, helped by the the mostly union funded American Leadership Project, holding her own in Indiana, polls showing her eating into Obama’s substantial North Carolina Lead, and her endorsement from Governor Easley — it will be a net loss for Obama.
Ben Domenech: 1. No - his campaign is more lucky than smart, and an attempted Wright story plant is just too Clintonian, frankly. Either way, that’s irrelevant moving forward: it’s now out of control. A Moyers interview I’ll buy as a plant, but not an National Press Club appearance.
2. Not fatal, but “a hit, a very palpable hit.” What the Wright controversy has really achieved is a complete eradication of the idea that Obama is a cross-cultural post-partisan uniter. Yes, he will get hammered on this stuff for the rest of the year; yes, he can easily be described as Dukakis, Kerry, and Carter rolled into one. The real question is, does this controversy and what it’s told us about Obama mean that - as some are starting to argue - that Hillary would actually be a more formidable candidate for McCain to face in the fall? I’m not ready to say that yet, but it’s possible.
3. No, I still think he wins NC by 8-9 points - he’ll get a so-so boost out of it, with a major story being an even more racially divided base - but he’s limping to Colorado at this point, and everybody knows it. Remember, Puerto Rico routinely gets 75-80% turnout, and there’s no way he’s going to make a dent there - if Clinton gets anything approaching an equal IN win and just carries the contests as she should, she might very well go to Denver with a slim popular vote lead even without Michigan. This will be a huge talking point for her.
Pejman Yousefzadeh: 1. If they coordinated, they were foolish because all this served to do was to take Obama off his basic message.
2. Not necessarily. But of course, none of this has done Obama any favors.
3. If I knew the answer to that, I would be at the racetrack on a daily basis.
Thomas Crown: Like Moe says, the Best Democratic Primary EVER.
Moe Lane: If they divvy up the MI delegates as per the last proposal suggested
…then there’s no legitimate reason not to count Michigan in the popular vote total.
Erick Erickson: 1. There was no “active coordination,” but I suspect there was a conversation. This man has been Obama’s “spiritual advisor” and mentor for twenty years. Obama, his wife, and his kids all go to that church. He is, in Obama’s words, a member of the family. It doesn’t take active coordination to plan all of this. All it takes is a conversation and some strongly implied language between the two about what Barack needs to move beyond this.
2. I think it has coupled with the others. As Barack goes on, a pattern develops. The pattern shows Obama’s willingness to surround himself with undesirables, deny they are undesirable until confronted by the facts, throw them under the bus denying he knew the facts, then confront the fact that he knew the facts all along. Obama has too little experience by which to judge him. We are forced to make a judgment based on his judgment, which is demonstrably lacking.
3. I think Obama takes it on the chin. He will still win North Carolina, but it will be close enough that the Clintons can portray it as a victory. He will lose Indiana. The delegate totals will be close enough that both will slug it out demanding super delegates take their side. It will be glorious. Clinton will win. Black voters and hippies will sit this one out.
streiff: I think the idea of a coordinated Obama-Wright action borders on the absurd. Being an Occam’s Razor type of guy I think when the Wright story refused to go away Obama realized that his association with Wright was a major negative and did what any other politician would do to a long time friend, associate, or family member under similar circumstances: he tossed him under the bus. Wright, for his part, thinks that he’s being unfairly maligned. Why shouldn’t he? He’s been preaching this noxious racialist booshwah for 20 plus years, he’s the guy who convinced people that Obama was black enough, he’s the guy who contributed the title to Obama’s ghostwritten self-hagiography, and now, when the going gets tough he ends up with Michelin tracks on him. I think we’ll be hearing a lot more from the Rev Wright.
How much this hurts Obama in the Democrat primary is anyone’s guess, but I think it does hurt him. Even though a good portion of the Democrat base is still scratching its head in amazement that anyone is upset or concerned by Bittergate, Wright, and especially Ayers, I think it guarantees that Indiana will go for Hillary at a higher rate than she had expected and it will cost Obama votes in North Carolina. The take away from this should be that Obama can’t win the most important Blue states. If it goes to a convention, a lot of superdelegates will be thinking about the ads their opponents will run in the fall if they do vote for Obama.
I think he has a sucking chest wound in terms of a general election campaign. I don’t see how, absent some deus ex machina event, he recovers from this by November especially if Hillary campaigns until the convention. At a minimum his “new type of politician” schtick is dead and he’ll be running as a sorta black (now that he’s repudiated the guy how gave him the racialist cred he neeeded) George McGovern.
absentee: 1. I think Thomas is right as rain. Wright and congregants know Barack sat there for twenty years out of understanding, not ignorance. He sat there out of agreement. It’s absurd the extent to which the man is surrounded by anti-American sentiment and vile thinking and yet still tries to place himself outside of it. These are the waters he swims in. Wright thinks he’s right, and he thinks Barack thinks he’s right. They aren’t colluding, Wright is doing what any good kos-style Democrat would do. He’s demanding validation and endorsement, and he’s expecting his point of view to treated as the Word by a man he believes to be beholden to him.
2. In democrat circles this is hardly fatal. They wait with bated breath for some turn of phrase they can latch on to with religious fervor as ‘the’ definitive answer. Americabloggers were claiming the controvery “quelled” weeks ago, before the “We The People” speech, based on a few words at a press conference. His latest will no doubt be touted as the all-time superlative association-breaking of the universe. In the general, it depends on how well the Right side can illuminate the Obama world-view, Wright being a key part of that.
3. Have to defer to Adam C’s insights on that one.
Mark I: As the originator of the conspiracy theory on this board, I obviously think that Obama and Wright had some kind of arrangement. I can’t prove coordination, of course, but I agree with Erick that there was a whole lot of winking and nodding going on.
As to streiff’s point that Obama realized that Wright was a drag on the camapign and threw him under the bus, he didn’t actually do that until this week. In his Philadelphia speech, Obama said that Wright was a “part of me,” and that he, “could no more denounce him than I could denounce the black community.” That’s not throwing Wright under the bus, that’s drawing closer to him.
Now at some point, Obama did realize that Wright was a drag on the campaign, and that point was right after Pennsylvania. Bittergate hurt Obama a lot with rural, white, working-class voters in that state and he needed to do something to reach out to them. This new Wright flare up is just the thing.
Has all the controversy hurt Obama? I think that fact is evident in the fact that we are having this discussion. Prior to Wright and Bittergate, Obama was seen as above all this type of cynical political maneuvering. Now more people than us are wondering whether Obama could be involved in a political conspiracy worthy of any adjectives ever attributed to Karl Rove by the left. He’s been brought down to Earth. I have maintained that that has always been his campaign’s Achilles heel. Once he is shown to be a regular politician, he will lose most of his attractiveness. That process is now virtually complete.
Obama will win North Carolina in a squeaker, and lose Indiana by 10 points.
haystack: An illuminating article, written for a wholly different reason, has a hilarious apologentia for explaining WHY Obama and Wright were ever associated…and why it was a good and necessary thing:
“the most obvious explanation of his association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and former Weatherman Bill Ayers: after Obama graduated from college he became an inner-city organizer in Chicago, and they were natural allies for someone in a situation like that. We routinely demonize organizations like the United Nations that we desperately need and which are critical to missions like nation-building in Afghanistan.”
Barry’s inner-city Chicago version of the UN necessarily brings him together with “unsavory characters” so he can get done the dirty work of helping people…heh-
