Van Jones and Obama: Jeremiah Wright revisited?

In the wake of the Van Jones resignation, many members of the media have been preoccupied with asking the wrong question, namely, how did the vetting process fail so spectacularly? The vetting issue, notwithstanding the recent attempt by the Obama Administration to raise it for purposes of damage control, is a red herring. Any 12 year old with internet access and a laptop could have discovered the cornucopia of embarrassing riches coming from the lips of this neo-Marxist crack pot.

It is simply inconceivable that Van Jones’s controversial past was not well known to officials in the Obama Administration. The real issue is, given President Obama’s twenty year stint absorbing Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s wacky sermonizing, as well as his association with unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, why is anyone surprised at the appointment of a zany leftist like Van Jones to his Administration?

The more interesting question is why did Obama believe that the disclosure of Van Jones’s radical past would not create a firestorm of controversy? An examination of the unprecedented relationship between Obama and his enablers in the mainstream media will prove instructive in this regard.

During his quest for the presidency, in a very real sense, Barack Obama’s natural constituency was not African-Americans nor latte-liberals, but rather, the mainstream press. As an astute observer of the American media, Obama and his advisers realized from the start, that even though there was scant evidence to support claims that he was destined to be a transcendent political figure, he would be able to cultivate assiduously this pretense with the media’s willing assistance.

For many journalists, reporting on the unsavory aspects of Obama’s past would clash with what many viewed as their solemn duty to elect Barack Obama as penance for the nation’s past racial sins. As such, for the media, facts could never be allowed to get in the way with the sheer nobility of such an enterprise.

Thus, when the Jeremiah Wright controversy threatened to derail his candidacy, the press heralded Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia, as a 21st century Gettysburg Address. The media accepted his contextualization and moral equivalence explanation and made it clear that it would conduct no further inquiries into the Reverend Wright matter nor would any further examination by those dissatisfied with Obama’s attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable be tolerated.

Since the media dutifully functioned as the Praetorian Guard of the Barack Obama candidacy, he was effectively insulated from the consequences of the Jeremiah Wright affair. As such, he must have reasoned that Van Jones’s noxious radicalism would be an equally non worthy story. His handmaidens in the media did their best to comply with a complete blackout on the Van Jones story.

Many voters may have discounted the Reverend Wright affair as a past indiscretion because candidate Obama campaigned as a centrist and promised to practice a new kind of post-partisan politics. However, the Van Jones incident cannot be similarly dismissed nor rationalized.

For, many are asking, if Obama repudiated the toxic Jeremiah Wright during the campaign, and was sincere when he proclaimed his preacher’s more extreme views as offensive, why would he now, as president, appoint one of Wright’s ideological disciples as a member of his Administration?

For, although the media is still squarely in Obama’s corner, now that he is president, they can no longer effectively shield him from the consequences of his executive decisions. From the disastrous stimulus to the cap and trade bill, to his health care initiative, the raucous Town Hall meetings of the summer indicate that a previously somnolent public has now awoken and has started to take notice of the gap between the promises of Obama’s rhetoric and the actual results achieved, as well as his detachment from reality in terms of describing truthfully, the likely impact of his proscribed policies.

In contradistinction to the Jeremiah Wright controversy, for many voters, the harsh reality of the Van Jones episode is that although candidate Obama may have disavowed his radical preacher, the presence in his Administration of one who shares many of his beliefs, simply cements in their minds, that by his deeds, ranging from his appointment of tax cheats to his cabinet to his reflexive defense of Henry Louis Gates, their president has turned out to be neither post-partisan, post-racial, nor a practitioner of a “new kind of politics.”

As evidenced by the precipitous drop in his approval ratings, the appointment of Van Jones to his Administration is just one more indication to an already skeptical public, that Obama has no intention of governing from the center, as he promised, but will continue with his attempt to impose a hard left agenda.

The Van Jones incident will not imperil Obama’s presidency, but it will serve to continue to diminish his already precarious standing with an electorate that now, no longer listens to what Obama says, but pays close attention to what he does.