As always with these things, it's better to read the entire article.
what it really comes down to is this: Which will have the lingering impact? Wright's videos or Obama's speech? If the repugs have anything to do with it, it will be the videos.
If Obama is the nominee and you want to help get him elected, you all better be prepared for this.
For months, Republican party officials have watched with increasing trepidation as Barack Obama has shattered fundraising records, packed arena after arena with shrieking fans and pulled in significant Republican and independent votes.
Now, with the emergence of the notorious video portraying Rev. Jeremiah Wright damning the country, criticizing Israel, faulting U.S. policy for the attacks of Sept. 11 and generally lashing out against white America, GOP strategists believe they’ve finally found an antidote to Obamamania.
In their view, the inflammatory sermons by Obama’s pastor offer the party a pathway to victory if Obama emerges as the Democratic nominee. Not only will the video clips enable some elements of the party to define him as unpatriotic, they will also serve as a powerful motivating force for the conservative base.
In fact, the video trove has convinced some that, after months of praying for Hillary Clinton and the automatic enmity which she arouses, that they may actually have easier prey.
“For the first time, some Republicans are rethinking Hillary as their first choice,” said Alex Castellanos, a veteran media consultant who recently worked for Mitt Romney’s campaign.
Even Obama’s much-lauded Tuesday speech, which detailed his relationship with his church and focused on the issue of racial reconciliation, failed to shake the notion that Republicans had been given a rare political gift.
“It was a speech written to mau-mau the New York Times editorial board, the network production people and the media into submission. Beautifully calibrated but deeply dishonest,” said GOP media consultant Rick Wilson, :freak: who crafted the ad in 2002 tying then-Sen. Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden. “Not good enough.”
Until now, questions about Obama’s allegiance to country had been largely confined to the fever swamps of the Internet and e-mail chains. They took the form of dark whispers about the greater meaning of Obama’s failure to put his hand over his heart during one national anthem, his decision not to wear an American flag lapel pin and, at their most toxic, the outright lie that he’s a Muslim or some sort of Manchurian candidate.
With Michelle Obama’s comments last month that she was, thanks to her husband’s candidacy, for the first time “really proud of ,” the topic entered the more mainstream elements of the conservative conversation, ricocheting across talk radio, cable news and blogs.
“All the sudden you’ve got two dots and two dots make a line,” said Castellanos. “You start getting some sense of who he is and it’s not the Obama you thought - he’s not the Tiger Woods of politics.”
But if Michelle Obama’s gaffe caused some ripples in the right-wing pond, the Wright videos have detonated the equivalent of a daisy cutter on the conservative landscape, awakening an otherwise dispirited party base.
“I usually get three or four emails a week on Obama,” said Michigan Republican chairman Saul Anuzis Monday. “Today I received more than 10 - all of them on his minister.”
<snip>
Yet some conservatives aren’t content to let the video played out organically, spread via “did-you-see-this?” e-mails-especially if it’s revealed that Obama was in fact in the church when Wright delivered some of his more incendiary remarks. The temptation to craft an ad may be overwhelming.
“Obama knows that if somebody puts him in church on some day that Wright said some crazy like white people injected blacks with AIDS he’s in a world of hurt,” said Rick Wilson. “I would eat this up like cake.”
From CBS news:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/19/politics/politico/main3949349.shtml
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