How The Jeremiah Wright Trial Balloon Crashed And Burned
Some Republicans still believe that if John McCain had wielded the incendiary Rev. Jeremiah Wright against Barack Obama in 2008, he might have been elected president. But a fierce backlash Thursday after the New York Times revealed a GOP super PAC was revisiting the possibility of using Wright in anti-Obama ads may have been the final nail in the coffin for that line of attack.
The Times detailed how a Republican billionaire and a group of strategists were mulling a multimillion-dollar ad campaign connecting Obama to the controversial reverend to be unleashed just before the Democratic National Convention. The Times report quickly had the Republican establishment running scared, denouncing the plan and insisting it was never being seriously considered, all before the West Coast had even woken up.
According to the report, conservative billionaire Joe Ricketts, founder of TD Ameritrade, was reviewing a proposal to attack president Obama by playing up his connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose controversial statements Obama disavowed on the campaign trail in 2008.
“The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” read the proposal, which included hiring an “extremely literate conservative African-American” as a spokesman and intended to paint Obama as a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.” The $10 million plan — called “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good” — would be financed by Ricketts, through the super PAC Ending Spending Action Fund.
The idea, the plan stated, was to do “exactly what John McCain would not let us do” in 2008. But the Romney campaign said it didn’t want to go that route, either.