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Three lessons of Jeremiah Wright plan against Obama

News about a proposal to use the Rev. Jeremiah Wright against President Obama in a GOP “super PAC” ad campaign caused the political world to combust. Charges of “race-baiting” flew, and suddenly the idea was an orphan. It’s safe to say, the ads will never be made. But there are lessons to be learned. 

2. Beware, political neophytes

Nati Hamik/AP
Joe Ricketts, the founder of online brokerage TD Ameritrade and the billionaire benefactor of conservative super PAC Ending Spending Action Fund, speaks in Omaha, Neb., in this photo taken Feb. 14.

  • By Linda Feldmann Staff writer

The lesson for Joe Ricketts – the founder of TD Ameritrade and the super PAC Ending Spending Action Fund – is that politics can be dangerous to one’s reputation. Before the Jeremiah Wright flap, Mr. Ricketts was unknown to most Americans. Now, anyone paying attention to the campaign has seen his name splashed all over the media in connection with the controversial proposal to attack Obama via his former pastor.

The ability to spend unlimited sums of money on behalf of a political campaign was sanctioned in 2010 by the US Supreme Court. Suddenly, wealthy people with a taste for politics can jump in with big piles of cash to try to influence discourse. But sometimes things can go awry. Remember Foster Friess? He was Rick Santorum’s big outside backer, who put his foot in his mouth when he joked on TV about birth control as “Bayer aspirin between the knees.”  

Ricketts, whose family also owns the Chicago Cubs, wasn’t even in the room when Strategic Perception made its proposal, said Brian Baker, president of the Ending Spending Action Fund, speaking Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“The world is full of bad ideas. This is one of them,” Mr. Baker said. “This wasn’t a proposal we requested at all. We never funded it…. We had nothing to do with the suggestion of Reverend Wright.”

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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