'Meet the Press' transcript for March 23, 2008

MR. RUSSERT:  And we're back.  Joining us now in New York, Jon Meacham of Newsweek, Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal.  Here in Washington, Gene Robinson of The Washington Post and Chuck Todd of NBC News.

Welcome all.  What a week in American politics and culture and in society. Barack Obama spoke to the nation on Tuesday, responding to some tapes about--from his pastor, Jeremiah Wright.  Let's watch the tape of Reverend Wright which forced a response and a discussion of race by Senator Obama. Here's Reverend Wright.

(Videotape, September 16, 2001)

REV. JEREMIAH WRIGHT:  We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye.  We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards.  America's chickens coming home to roost.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT:  And here's Senator Obama in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

(Videotape)

SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL):  Given my background, my politics and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough.  Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask.  Why not join another church?  And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television sets and YouTube, if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.  I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother, a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who, on more than one occasion, has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT:  Peggy Noonan, after the speech you wrote this:  "It was a good speech and a serious one.  I don't know if it will help him.  We're in uncharted territory.  ...  My sense:  The speech will be labeled by history as the speech that saved a candidacy or the speech that helped do it in." Reflecting now, a few days later, what's your sense?

MS. PEGGY NOONAN:  Oh, my sense, Tim, was that he made a good beginning. There are people who've been running around saying, "Oh, does this solve the, the question of race in America?" and "Does this solve all of his problems, Obama's problems in that area?" I don't think so.  But I think it is a good beginning.  I think he'll have a lot more that, that he'll have to be saying, and maybe all that--all of us will have to be saying a lot.  Maybe this'll be the beginning of a conversation.

I'll tell you in general, I feel that the 2008 election year had been getting a little grubby, it had been getting a little low.  There was race-baiting going on in South Carolina, there's this name-calling going on here.  I think Obama came forward and he added some height and some grace to the political conversation by trying to talk seriously and at some length and in a nonapplause-lined speech about the problem of race in America.  I think this was good, and, and I give him a lot of credit for a speech that tried to be frank.  At the same time, I don't know how it's going to work for him in a political way.  We are in uncharted territory.

MR. RUSSERT:  Gene Robinson, there has been a lot of--obviously, a lot of praise, this speech, but also a lot of criticism.  Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post wrote this:  "The question is why didn't he leave that church? Why didn't he leave--why doesn't he leave even today--a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) "God damn America"?  Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction.  ...  Obama ...  waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign.  Then answer this, Senator:  If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to" this "vitriolic divisiveness?  ...  It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well.  Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?"

MR. EUGENE ROBINSON:  Well, you know, at--first of all, I thought it was an extraordinary speech.  Why doesn't he leave the Reverend Wright?  You know, Reverend Wright has been portrayed in, in--throughout this whole thing as, as a, as some sort of exotic fringe figure who no one had ever heard of before, and those snippets have been portrayed as the, the whole of his ministry. Neither is true.  Later in the week, a photograph surfaced of the Reverend Wright at the White House being received by, by Bill Clinton at prayer breakfast the day the Starr report was, was released.  The point of which is he was not a fringe figure.  He was very well known in Chicago and elsewhere as a prominent clergyman whose, whose ministry is not fully represented by those snippets that, that keep, as Senator Obama said, running in a loop. Obviously, he's a man who's been very important to him spiritually and perhaps politically over the years, and, and I think, you know, that's a personal choice not to, not to leave the, the congregation.  The political effect on the Obama candidacy, you know, the jury is not in yet.  But what, what we do know so far is that he seems to have survived this, it, it, it appears.  Now, you--we can't say long term, but there's a new CBS poll that shows essentially it was kind of a, kind of a wash, that the speech did help, and equal numbers say they're more likely or less likely to vote for Obama.  And, and he's back up in the, in the Gallup tracking poll again.  He's, he's changed places with Hillary Clinton again.  So, so, you know, again, it doesn't seem to have been a disaster for him politically the way it, it appeared it might be earlier in the week.

MR. RUSSERT:  Jon Meacham, looking at the week, the comments by Reverend Wright, Barack Obama's speech, then subsequent to that, Barack Obama criticized for talking about his grandmother and defending his comments, he made the notion of a, a--described her as a typical white person which, which reignited another debate discussion.  What's your sense reflecting on what we've seen play out on the issue of race and politics in this country over the last week?

MR. JON MEACHAM:  My sense is that Senator Obama has put out the tactical fire for the moment, that he has, in fact, delivered, as Peggy was saying, as Gene said, a, a really, I think, interesting speech about this.  But it was one speech, and we are looking at a long general election campaign in which what the tape you just played is going to be played a great deal.  And I would argue that, tactically, in pure political terms, what happened to Senator Obama this week is, A, we learned that if he walks across Lake Michigan, he might sink actually...

MS. NOONAN:  Hm.

MR. MEACHAM:  ...which had not been the impression in many quarters of the country before now.  And secondly, that he is a--becoming much more conventional Democratic nominee for a general election season.  You can see now a more plausible way that Republicans or Obama's opponents can talk about how he, Senator Obama, is outside the mainstream without appearing to go too far, because there's no question that, I think, in my opinion, that Reverend Wright's remarks are outside the mainstream.  And whether this affects his path to the nomination or not, I don't know.  It's, it's a hard mathematical task for Senator Clinton to overcome.

But I think that we've learned, too, that in comments about--just how much words matter--I mean, that sounds obvious, but, when he said "typical white person," when he talks about how the--he hears one thing in the black world, one thing in the white world, he's making a very sophisticated and, and important point.  And we should all be willing, I think, to have a listen as carefully as he spoke in Philadelphia.  Because race is, is a, is an immensely complicated thing.  This is, as he put it, our original sin.  Nativism is our second sin.  So he called us, I think, to some extent, to be nuanced about something that requires nuance.  And I think that, politically, I think the country responded that way, and I'm--found it to be a rather cheerful week in that way.

MR. RUSSERT:  Peggy Noonan, as we know, Barack Obama's father was black, his mother was white.  He's able to see both races through his eyes, a part of his own experience.  Gene Robinson wrote this this week about something Obama said.

"Obama called on African-Americans to embrace `the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past,'" "to take `full responsibility for our own lives.' And he's absolutely right.

"This amounts to a new set of talking points for a discussion about race: Don't be paralyzed by history, but acknowledge its affects.  Recognize that whites have legitimate grievances that are not racist.  Don't cling to victimhood as an all-purpose excuse.  Accept personal responsibility."

Is Obama uniquely situated to talk bluntly to both the white community and the black community?

MS. NOONAN:  Maybe he's situated to speak with a certain sensitivity.  He's a black man.  He also is white.  He is both.  That means he has experience of both communities, if that isn't too clunky a word to use.  Let me take--say, Tim, I thought one of the most important things that he did in his speech was talk about racism even though he started with slavery, and that was a long time ago.  He talked about racism as a generational problem, as a problem that had changed over the years.  He said Reverend Wright came from the Jim Crow days, he came from another America, and he was shaped and misshapen by that dreadful cultural arrangement of Jim Crow.  Younger black people and younger white people do not have the same experiences.  They have to understand each other, they have to mark their progress, they have to, on both sides, stop using the past as an excuse not to get along or, or not to change and improve. So I haven't heard anybody say that in, in politics in some time in America. I thought it was a real insight, really smart and the beginning of a wonderful start-off point for, for more talk.

Let me say something else, though.  It seems to me, every time I look at a YouTube of Reverend Wright talking and doing his thing and saying his strange things, I notice two things.  One is that the people behind him look bored. Another is that frequently, not always, but when they pan to the crowd, his audience looks almost passive, like we are receiving this, we're hearing this, we know what's going on.  It seemed to me that in his statements, Wright was not just extreme, radical--we all know the words to say, because they are true--but that he was a throwback.  He was old-fashioned.  He himself was the voice of yesterday.  And I was wondering about the extent to which that audience and people like Barack and Michelle Obama know he is yesterday, and yet he has some wonderful things within him as a human being.  I just throw that open as a possibility.

MORE FROM MEET THE PRESS

Meet the Press Section Front

Remembering Tim Russert July 20: Al Gore, political roundtable July 13: Carly Fiorina, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), politcal roundtable June 29: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA), Gov. Dave Freudenthal (D-WY), Gov. Bill Ritter (D-CO), Chuck Todd June 22: Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), political roundtable June 15 transcript, video NBC's Tom Brokaw to moderate 'Meet the Press' through election   Images: The life of the political journalist   Slideshow: A look back at 60 years of 'Meet the Press' Find ‘Meet the Press’ in your area Meet the Press Section Front   Add Meet the Press headlines to your news reader: