"Audience members in a Washington, DC, synagogue hurled boos and heckles at journalist Bob Woodward..."

"... when he repeatedly interrupted two New York Times reporters during a discussion about their new Harvey Weinstein book Wednesday evening. Woodward was speaking to reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey at the Sixth and I synagogue about their book 'She Said' when audience members began walking out, booing and tweeting criticisms of the questions posed by Woodward.... 'Let her finish!' one audience member shouted from a balcony.... [A]nother shouted, 'All women deserve to be heard!' when Woodward asked the authors about Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.... 'When @mega2e explained she built trust w sources by talking abt how the harm can’t be undone but together they can build constructive power from pain, Woodward interrupted, giddily, "that was your standard line?"'.... 'Twohey and Kantor told Woodward repeatedly that they believed Weinstein’s assaults were about "power," but he didn’t seem satisfied'.... 'So it’s about power?' she said he asked. 'It’s about sex also though, isn’t it?'"

From "Bob Woodward booed, heckled during #MeToo book conversation" (NY Post).

Show me the video. I'm assuming Woodward did a fine job and the NYT reporters benefited from his keeping it lively. But maybe it was one of these mythic examples of a sexist man controlling women's speech.

"Toward the end of the book, Kantor and Twohey devote two chapters to Christine Blasey Ford and her decision to air her sexual-assault allegations against the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh."

"This, and the book’s finale, 'The Gathering,' seem appended, an anticlimactic climax. In 'The Gathering,' the reporters assemble 12 of the sexual abuse victims they interviewed (including a McDonald’s worker, Kim Lawson, who helped organize a nationwide strike over the fast-food franchise’s failure to address sexual harassment) at Gwyneth Paltrow’s Brentwood mansion to talk, over gourmet Japanese cuisine, about what they’ve endured since going public with their charges. The testimonials inevitably descend into platitudes about personal 'growth' and getting 'some sense of myself back.' At one point, Paltrow starts crying over the way Weinstein had invoked his support for her career to get women to submit to his advances, and Lawson’s friend (a McDonald’s labor organizer who came with her so she wouldn’t feel alone in a room full of movie stars) hands the actress a box of tissues. These therapeutic scenes paste a pat conclusion onto a book that otherwise keeps the focus not on individual behavior or personal feelings but on the apparatuses of politics and power."

From Susan Faludi's review of "SHE SAID/Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement" by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. (Kantor and Twohey are NYT reporters, and the review is in the NYT.)

Interesting detail about Paltrow, the tissues, and the McDonald's workers.

Who are the women who accepted the deal as offered by Harvey Weinstein? Will their names be kept out of the press? Should they?

I'm listening to the NYT podcast, "The Daily," and today's subject is "Harvey Weinstein’s New Accusers."

The NYT reporter Jodi Kantor described listening to the stories told by Weinstein's accusers:

It's like watching the same movie again and again and again. It appears to have been a system. It was facilitated by so many people. Executives. Very low-level assistants who had to do some of the dirty work. There were a lot of logistics involved. In every case that we documented, according to the women, Weinstein asked to meet with them for a work reason. And in some of the stories we've heard, what the women describe is a very explicit work-for-sex quid pro quo. Other women say that just as Weinstein put the moves on, he essentially name-dropped. He said, Look at what I've done for this one. Or that one. He implied: If you want to succeed in this business, this is what you have to do. If you get intimate with me, I'll be able to make a big star like such-and-such.

Who is such-and-such? Will such-and-such's name be withheld? Obviously, Weinstein could have lied. He could have named the biggest star without it being true that the woman did what he said was a necessary step for a young, beautiful woman to get a role in one of his movies. Indeed, the intimacy test could have worked the other way: If you're pliable enough to give your beautiful body to a horrible man like me, you don't have what it takes.

The very next topic in the podcast is Gwyneth Paltrow, who was Weinstein's biggest female star at that time. We're told she rejected Weinstein's offer.

In quid pro quo, you get what you bargained for, but what if you give and don't get? You can't sue to force Harvey Weinstein to make you a star. Some women who've made accusations got monetary settlements, but these women had to give even more (in the form of nondisclosure agreements). And they seem to have rejected the sex or had it forced on them.

Did anyone accept the arrangement, give the sex willingly, and expect Weinstein to fulfill his end of the bargain? We haven't heard the name of anyone in that position. I assume there are lots of names in this category. Notice that we don't know what they got. Did anyone enter the bargain with eyes-open, deciding it's worth it, and get what she was led to expect?

Weinstein's modus operandi wouldn't work if the open secret included the knowledge that the women who said yes got little or nothing. If Weinstein were lying, using names of women who didn't in fact take the offer, then he was slandering the women he named. Those stars — such as, perhaps, Paltrow — could have brought lawsuits, but there's little reason to believe that the potential for a defamation lawsuit would have stopped a man who was committing so many legal wrongs and getting away with it for 20+ years.

So much silence facilitating so much harm! Should the women who took the bargain and got what they wanted out of it be regarded as victims and entitled to keep their names secret, or are they part of a system that hurt many others, and subject to outing?

"It was largely the men of the class who became the true creators, founding companies that changed behavior around the world and using the proceeds to fund new projects that extended their influence."

"Some of the women did well in technology, working at Google or Apple or hopping from one start-up adventure to the next. Few of them described experiencing the kinds of workplace abuses that have regularly cropped up among women in Silicon Valley."

From Jodie Kantor's NYT article "A Brand New World In Which Men Ruled/Instead of narrowing gender gaps, the technology industry created vast new ones for Stanford University’s pioneering class of 1994."

"What is the most dignified way for [Hillary Clinton] to make money?"

Jodi Cantor buries a key question in her NYT article about what Hillary Clinton will do next.

There are 2 things I notice are missing:

1. How old is Hillary Clinton? The NYT seems to love to tell us how old everyone they mention is, and I know that rule doesn't apply to someone who's in the news all the time, but when we talk about what Hillary will do next, we ought to consider the option: Nothing. She's 65. (I looked it up.) She can close the door on the public and live a private life.

2. Chelsea! There is one mention of Chelsea in the article. The Bill Clinton foundation — something Hillary could devote herself to — has "made strides lately, with... and more involvement from Chelsea Clinton." It seems to me that a big option for Hillary is to create the future political phenomenon that is Chelsea!

"Tragically, it seems the president feels boxed in by his blackness."

"It has, at times, been painful to watch this particular president’s calibrated, cautious and sometimes callous treatment of his most loyal constituency... African-Americans will have lost ground in the Obama era."

Email from Tavis Smiley to NYT reporter Jodi Kantor, quoted in "For President, a Complex Calculus of Race and Politics."

"Wearing Brave Face, Obama Braces for Health Care Ruling."

NYT headline. Article by Jodi Kantor:

Former advisers are emphasizing the many aspects of the bill that are not connected to the mandate, like the subsidies to buy insurance. Some aides even argue privately that losing the mandate could be a political boon, because it would rob Republicans of their core complaint against the law.

Yeah, that's what I've been saying. Plus, Obama would get a new issue: The Supreme Court has too many conservative activists and needs re-balancing; a Democrat should make the next appointment(s). And if the decision goes the other way, Romney will have the corresponding arguments: 1. We need a President who will sign the repeal of Obamacare, and 2. The Supreme Court has too many liberals who don't respect the Constitution and we need a conservative President to re-balance it.

Back to Kantor:

"Mitt and Ann Romney’s marriage is strong because they believe they will live together in an eternal afterlife..."

Writes Jodi Kantor in the NYT, citing "relatives and friends" as the source of information. It's a whole long article about Mitt Romney's Mormon faith.

Fascinating! But what I'd like to know is what Barack and Michelle Obama are picturing for the afterlife. NYT, can you clue me in? Because I feel like there are so many things we never found out about Obama the first time around in 2008. How about now?

But, of course, Jodi Kantor published a whole book about the Obamas. It's called "The Obamas." I bought it. On Kindle! So let me do a little search for an answer to my question. How are the Obama's planning to spend their eternal life? Do they believe there's a heaven, and do husbands and wives stay together there?

Word searches in "The Obamas" that returned 0 results: afterlife, afterworld, immortality, immortal, beyond the grave....

Other fruitless searches: eternal (2 matches, both to Obama's calling himself "the eternal optimist"), eternity (some short period of time is referred to as "an eternity in presidential time"), heaven (at the inauguration, Beyoncé Knowles sang "At Last" to the Obamas — "Life is like a song... Here we are in heaven").

In fact, there are only 2 occurrences of "religion" in the text of "The Obamas."

Barack Obama — "He's a Vulcan, no doubt about it. Now the question arises, do we want a Vulcan for president? Are we ready for a Vulcan president?"

Lawgiver says it in the comments to this post, commenting on this amazing NYT article (that I've now linked to 3 times this morning).

Barack Obama, the law student, was not like you other law students.

From the same Jodi Kantor piece discussed in the previous post, I had to break out these law school nuggets.

“I thought of him much more as a colleague” than a student, said Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard for whom Mr. Obama worked. “I didn’t think of him as someone to send out on mechanical tasks of digging out all the cases.” Other students could do that, Professor Tribe added.

Other students.

Long before the presidential race, some around him seemed to resent his ability to galvanize a following. “Bluebooking is not important for celebrities,” fellow students joked about him in the law review parody, referring to the tedious process of checking citations.

That's for you other students.

Obama has "developed a self-discipline so complete... that he has established dominion over not only what he does but also how he feels."

Jodi Kantor writes in a long NYT piece about Obama's superhuman transcendence of emotion for the sake of political triumph:

He does not easily exult, despair or anger: to do so would be an indulgence, a distraction from his goals. Instead, they say, he separates himself from the moment and assesses.....

But with Barack Hussein Obama officially becoming the Democratic presidential nominee on Wednesday night....

Wow, the NYT used the middle name. Can we say Barack Hussein Obama now without raising the presumption that we're out to get him?

There is little about him that feels spontaneous or unpolished, and even after two books, thousands of campaign events and countless hours on television, many Americans say they do not feel they know him. The accusations of elusiveness puzzle those closest to the candidate. Far more than most politicians, they say, he is the same in public as he is in private.

This is the real Obama, then. There is no other. Some will say: Aha, I told you: empty suit. But I'm thinking: The 20th century is over. No more Freud and hippies. No more contempt for the repressed and delving into the subconscious and imprecations to let it all hang out. There is no subconscious. There is no it to hang out. The 21st century man has arrived. Reorient yourself for the future.

Starting in law school, Mr. Obama began pulling together a large cast of mentors, well-connected and civic-minded friends who rose in Chicago and Illinois politics along with him, including a spouse he thought was ideal.

“He loved Michelle,” said Gerald Kellman, Mr. Obama’s community organizing boss, but he was also looking for the kind of partner who could join him in his endeavors. “This is a person who could help him manage the pressures of the life he thought he wanted.”

No, no, don't speculate about the substance of his marriage. That would be too 20th century. What you see is what it is.

If there is one quality that those closest to Mr. Obama marvel at, it is his emotional control. This is partly a matter of temperament...

I told you: he's phlegmatic.

...they say, partly an effort by Mr. Obama to step away from his own feelings so he can make dispassionate judgments. “He doesn’t allow himself the luxury of any distraction,” said Valerie Jarrett, a close adviser. “He is able to use his disciplined mind to not get caught up in the emotional swirl.”

No vortex for him.

It is not that Mr. Obama does not experience emotion, friends say. But he detaches and observes, revealing more in his books than he does in the moment. “He has the qualities of a writer,” Mr. Axelrod said. “I get the sense that he’s participating in these things but also watching them.”...

As a campaigner, Mr. Obama had to learn to sometimes let simple emotion rule. When Mr. Axelrod first devised “Yes We Can” as a slogan during Mr. Obama’s Senate campaign, the candidate resisted: it was a little corny for his taste. “That’s where the high-minded and big-thinking Barack came in,” said Peter Giangreco, a consultant to the Obama campaign. “His initial instincts were off from where regular people’s were.”

Odd that the crowd got so emotional, when he was aloof. What were they looking for in him? And why did they think they saw it?

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian writes:

It's funny how the New York Times seems to think this article makes Obama look good, when it actually makes him sort of seem like a sociopath.

Or like Mr Spock.

But then, Mr Spock would never become a Democrat. Illogical, Captain.

MORE: I've set up a new post on the Obama's-a-Vulcan theme, so comments on that theme would be better over there.

Also in the comments, Amba writes:

You're so 20th century you can't help analyzing him even while commanding us to get over analyzing him.

Ha ha. Yes. I will never get out of that place.

Me too. I found a Jungian twist that kind of fits (it's down at the end of this post.... What's interesting is that the "negative puer aeternus" has trouble ever making commitments. Obama made commitments to his family and (for a while) to his black and Christian identity, as if he knew he needed to be "grounded" even if it did not come naturally.

Fascinating. Go over there and read the whole thing. Snippet:

John McCain, by contrast [to Obama's puer aeternus], is senex, the archetype of the "old man." A Jungian would say (annoyingly) that they "constellate" each other, that is, whenever one shows up it invokes the other.

Spooky!

Barack Obama at the University of Chicago Law School.

Jodi Kantor tells the story of Barack Obama at the University of Chicago Law School.

Mr. Obama... was well liked at the law school, yet he was always slightly apart from it, leaving some colleagues feeling a little cheated that he did not fully engage....

“I don’t think anything that went on in these chambers affected him,” said Richard Epstein, a libertarian colleague who says he longed for Mr. Obama to venture beyond his ideological and topical comfort zones. “His entire life, as best I can tell, is one in which he’s always been a thoughtful listener and questioner, but he’s never stepped up to the plate and taken full swings.”

What are we seeing here? A shy man? A cipher? A man with a hidden agenda?

Mr. Obama had other business on his mind, embarking on five political races during his 12 years at the school. Teaching gave him satisfaction, along with a perch and a paycheck, but he was impatient with academic debates....

This seems very practical. A good hypothesis is: Obama is a politician, through and through.

Mr. Obama arrived at the law school in 1991 thanks to Michael W. McConnell, a conservative scholar who is now a federal appellate judge. As president of The Harvard Law Review, Mr. Obama had impressed Mr. McConnell with editing suggestions on an article; on little more than that, the law school gave him a fellowship, which amounted to an office and a computer, which he used to write his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.”

On little more than that... Come on. That was an easy decision. And we needn't be coy about what the "little more" was:

The school had almost no black faculty members, a special embarrassment given its location on the South Side....

His most original course, a historical and political seminar as much as a legal one, was on racism and law....

Clearly, the law school's interests were served as Obama used it to build his political career.

“Are there legal remedies that alleviate not just existing racism, but racism from the past?” Adam Gross, now a public interest lawyer in Chicago, wrote in his class notes in April 1994.

It's really rather funny to quote this long-ago law student for a point that is one of most common questions in the law of race discrimination. This is another example of presenting the ordinary as amazing.

For all the weighty material, Mr. Obama had a disarming touch. He did not belittle students; instead he drew them out, restating and polishing halting answers, students recall.

This describes nearly all law professors I've known (through a period that began in 1978).

In one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. “Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other?” he asked in a mock-innocent voice.

Well, this is a bit interesting. He had a "clueless white" person voice that he used it class for laughs?

As his reputation for frank, exciting discussion spread, enrollment in his classes swelled. Most scores on his teaching evaluations were positive to superlative. Some students started referring to themselves as his groupies. (Mr. Obama, in turn, could play the star. In what even some fans saw as self-absorption, Mr. Obama’s hypothetical cases occasionally featured himself. “Take Barack Obama, there’s a good-looking guy,” he would introduce a twisty legal case.)

I'm sure he was a popular teacher, but there are many popular law professors, and the locution "groupie" is not as uncommon as Kantor's prose leads you to think.

Liberals flocked to his classes...

But the liberal students did not necessarily find reassurance....

For one thing, Mr. Obama’s courses chronicled the failure of liberal policies and court-led efforts at social change...

Ahem! This is the conventional left critique of liberalism! It is a call to a stronger form of political consciousness.

... He was wary of noble theories, students say; instead, they call Mr. Obama a contextualist, willing to look past legal niceties to get results.

This was not at all special. This was absolutely standard lefty lawprof talk at the time.

For another, Mr. Obama liked to provoke. He wanted his charges to try arguing that life was better under segregation, that black people were better athletes than white ones.

“I remember thinking, ‘You’re offending my liberal instincts,’ ” Mary Ellen Callahan, now a privacy lawyer in Washington, recalled.

Offending liberal instincts was what lefty lawproffing was all about in those days. Anyone who reads this article and imagines that Obama has some conservative leanings is not getting the context.

While students appreciated Mr. Obama’s evenhandedness, colleagues sometimes wanted him to take a stand. When two fellow faculty members asked him to support a controversial antigang measure, allowing the Chicago police to disperse and eventually arrest loiterers who had no clear reason to gather, Mr. Obama discussed the issue with unusual thoughtfulness, they say, but gave little sign of who should prevail — the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposed the measure, or the community groups that supported it out of concern about crime.

“He just observed it with a kind of interest,” said Daniel Kahan, now a professor at Yale.

I would assume that colleagues strongly approved of "evenhandedness" in the classroom — which is the conventional pose, even among lawprofs who are politically engaged outside of class. The key piece of information here is that Obama either sought to avoid making a record of what he thought or he actually lacked opinions.

After his loss in the 2000 Congressional primary race to former Black Panther Bobby L. Rush, "colleagues noticed that he seemed exhausted and was smoking more than usual," and they offered him a tenured faculty position (with a job for his wife). Think about that! He never produced a word of legal scholarship, after all those years teaching, and now they would simply give him tenure — at the University of Chicago Law School, a top 5 school, where the faculty is known for voluminous scholarly publishing. The case for tenure in law school depends predominantly on scholarship. You don't get tenure for being a very popular teacher. The failure to publish anything should be fatal to the tenure case of a lawprof who was hired with a belief in his promise as a scholar, but here tenure is bundled into the original offer to someone who had demonstrated that he lacked that promise. So this is interesting. The University of Chicago Law School has some explaining to do.

It's also interesting that Obama turned down the sumptuous offer. He chose to run for the U.S. Senate. But is this hard to fathom? I don't think so. I think he'd figured something out. He had made himself into something and he knew what it was. He couldn't win the district that embraced a former Black Panther. That meant something bad, but also something really good. He was a black politician who could break out the old limitations. Running for the Senate seat was the most rational thing for him to do at that point. The run for President came soon after. He knew what he was and what he might do. And that — not anything he did as a lawprof — was amazing.

"With each passing day, it seems a little less likely that the next president of the United States will wear a skirt..."

Did Mrs. Clinton ever wear a skirt? Not once, during the entire campaign. But that's not the point of the linked article (by Jodi Kantor). It's more talk about the whole "woman President" business that has always left me cold. Hillary Clinton is not a woman, she's a particular woman. (She's that woman, Mrs. Clinton.) I have always resisted the efforts to get women jazzed up about the idea of a woman President. But for those who did get absorbed into that idiotic emotional manipulation, there is now the need to work toward closure.

“Women felt this was their time, and this has been stolen from them,” said Marilu Sochor, 48, a real estate agent in Columbus, Ohio, and a Clinton supporter. “Sexism has played a really big role in the race.”

Not everyone agrees. “When people look at the arc of the campaign, it will be seen that being a woman, in the end, was not a detriment and if anything it was a help to her,” the presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said in an interview. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign is faltering, she added, because of “strategic, tactical things that have nothing to do with her being a woman.”

I'm with Goodwin on this one. Clinton used the woman thing to manipulate us whenever she could, and her campaign simply failed, as most campaigns fail.

As a former first lady whose political career evolved from her husband’s, Mrs. Clinton was always an imperfect test case for female achievement. “Somebody’s wife,” as Elaine Kamarck, a professor of government at Harvard and a Clinton supporter, described her.

"Somebody." Indeed.

Mrs. Clinton’s supporters point to a nagging series of slights: the fixation on her clothes, even her cleavage; chronic criticism that her voice is shrill; calls for her to exit the race; and most of all, the male commentators in the news media who, they argue, were consistently tougher on her than on Mr. Obama.

It's not that they were tough on her, but that they were easy on him.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, many women say with regret, did not inspire a deep or nuanced conversation between men and women, only familiar gender-war battles consisting of male gibes and her supporters’ angry responses. Mr. Obama, who sought to minimize the role of race in his candidacy, led something of a national dialogue about it, but Mrs. Clinton, who made womanhood an explicit part of her run, seemed unwilling or unable to talk candidly about gender.

Interesting, but Obama did not set out to lead that dialogue. He was dragged into it. Face it, Obama has the more agile, able mind. He presented himself as transcending race — something he could see many Americans want to do — and when he had to deal with it — he spoke in broad, inclusive terms. Clinton promoted herself from the start as deserving special support because of her sex, and then when things didn't go her way, she and her surrogates were quick to attribute her problems to sex and to whine and blame about sexism.

IN THE COMMENTS: dbp says:

"With each passing day, it seems a little less likely that the next president of the United States will wear a skirt..."

My hopes in this regard were dashed once Rudy dropped out.

The "long and painful falling out" between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright — and what made Obama snap.

At the NYT, Michael Powell and Jodi Kantor have background on the Obama's decision to speak out more forcefully against Jeremiah Wright:

Late Monday night, in the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill, N.C., Barack Obama’s long, slow fuse burned to an end. Earlier that day he had thumbed through his BlackBerry, reading accounts of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s latest explosive comments on race and America. But his remarks to the press this day had amounted to a shrug of frustration.

Only in this hotel room, confronted with the televised replay of the combustible pastor, did the candidate realize the full import of the remarks, his aides say.

Yes, there really was something infuriating about Wright's smirks and mannerisms. You could bend over backwards and excuse the text — if you were so inclined — but on the video, it's unmistakable that Wright has contempt for Obama and fully intended to harm him.

[The] long and painful falling out [was] marked by a degree of mutual incomprehension, friends and aides say. It began at the moment Mr. Obama declared his candidacy, when he abruptly uninvited his pastor from delivering an invocation, injuring the older man’s pride and fueling his anger....

Only a few years ago, the tightness of the bond between Mr. Obama and Mr. Wright was difficult to overstate....

In this learned and radical pastor, Mr. Obama found a guide who could explain Jesus and faith in terms intellectual no less than emotional, and who helped a man of mixed racial parentage come to understand himself as an African-American. “Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black,” Mr. Obama wrote in his autobiography “Dreams From My Father.”

At the same time, as Mr. Obama’s friends and aides now acknowledge, he was aware that, shorn of their South Side Chicago context, the words and cadences of a politically left-wing black minister could have a very problematic echo. So Mr. Obama haltingly distanced himself from his pastor.

Read the whole article. There's too much to excerpt. One key point is that Wright blames David Axelrod:

[Wright] repeatedly mentioned Mr. Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, saying that while he was expert at promoting black candidates with white voters, he did not know much about relating to the black community.

“They’re spiriting him away from people in the African-American community,” Mr. Wright said, “David doesn’t know the African-American church scene.”

And Powell and Kantor credit (or blame) blogs for keeping the controversy alive:

Blogs, and a few print reporters, kept asking questions about Mr. Wright’s politics, his black liberation theology. Snippets of his fiery, soaring sermons began to appear on cable televisions and in blog posts.

We learn that that the cruise, which had Wright out-of-touch at the time of Obama's Philadelphia speech, was long planned, not a convenient exile. Wright "returned to find his name a term of opprobrium all across the nation." (Don't cruise ships have TV and newspapers and internet connection? If you were Wright, wouldn't you be monitoring what people were saying about you?)

Mr. Wright... wanted only to explain himself.

Not to punish Obama?

His first steps seemed to go well enough, particularly a relatively temperate interview with Bill Moyers on PBS. But at the National Press Club on Monday, Mr. Wright took a few questions, and his scholarly mien fell away.

“His initial statement was fine,” said the Rev. Michael Pfleger of St. Sabina Roman Catholic Church in Chicago and a friend of Mr. Wright. “But the questions caused a response from Reverend Wright that I wasn’t expecting.”

Mr. Wright seemed to sense nothing wrong. A friend said he appeared buoyant and relieved afterward.

He got high off the crowd somehow. Manic. He thought he was doing fine.

But a couple hundred miles south, Mr. Obama was soon seething.

"Soon" is funny. It took him a long time to get mad. But it looks like a very personal kind of mad. It's not so much that Wright's ideas were anti-American and his politics were extremist and left-wing. Obama had to have known that from a 20-year association with the man (unless he only had the association for appearances and political advancement and never really cared what Wright thought). Obama got mad, it seems, because he could see that Wright meant to hurt him and was getting fired up moving for the kill.

"There is no repentance on the part of The New York Times. There is no integrity when it comes to The Times."

Writes the Reverend Jeremiah Wright to Jodi Kantor of the NYT in a letter published at Time.com:

Out of a two-hour conversation with you about Barack’s spiritual journey and my protesting to you that I had not shaped him nor formed him, that I had not mentored him or made him the man he was, even though I would love to take that credit, you did not print any of that...

... I spent approximately five to seven minutes on Barack’s taking advice from one of his trusted campaign people and deeming it unwise to make me the media spotlight on the day of his announcing his candidacy for the Presidency and what do you print? You and your editor proceeded to present to the general public a snippet, a printed “sound byte” and a titillating and tantalizing article about his disinviting me to the Invocation on the day of his announcing his candidacy.

The letter is dated March 11, 2007. Since then, no doubt, Jeremiah Wright has learned a whole lot more about how people extract sound bites (or "sound byte"). (But it's hard to believe he was so innocent even back then.)

The NYT responds to Times's printing of the old letter:

Ms. Kantor conducted herself professionally and honestly throughout her dealings with Mr. Wright. She did what any journalist would do: She brought the news he conveyed during the interview to the attention of her editors, including me. We decided to do what a newspaper does: to present that news to our readers, accurately, fairly and as quickly as possible. Ms. Kantor in no way misrepresented the nature or purpose of the interview; as soon as it was ready for publication, we published exactly the longer story we told Mr. Wright we were working on and that he referred to in his letter.

Putting aside the question of why a letter that is more than a year old is suddenly getting new circulation, it is worth noting that at no time has Mr. Wright challenged the accuracy of either story written by Ms. Kantor – both of which, given the events of the last several weeks, seem remarkably prescient about the potential political peril in the Obama-Wright relationship.”

Good answer!

ADDED: Instapundit links here and also points to this post by Ed Morrissey, speculating that Wright's letter caused the Times to go easy on Wright when it ultimately published the long piece Kantor was working on. He notes that her article has a very tame presentation of Wright's sermons. She wrote:

Mr. Wright preached black liberation theology, which interprets the Bible as the story of the struggles of black people, who by virtue of their oppression are better able to understand Scripture than those who have suffered less. That message can sound different to white audiences, said Dwight Hopkins, a professor at University of Chicago Divinity School and a Trinity member. “Some white people hear it as racism in reverse,” Dr. Hopkins said, while blacks hear, “Yes, we are somebody, we’re also made in God’s image.”

Ed says:

That’s about as close as Kantor ever got to the incendiary rhetoric offered by Wright. She apparently didn’t bother to research the videos and copies of sermons easily available, and so missed the exhortations that 9/11 was America’s “chickens coming home to roost”, that black people should sing “God Damn America”, and that the US had created HIV-AIDS as a tool for genocide against people of color. One wonders why Wright bothered to complain about the minor issue at hand while all of these political land mines remained just below the surface — and why Kantor and the Times never bothered to research Wright in more depth.

... [D]id the Times pull its punches because Wright complained about their early coverage?

Good question!