The media is already scrambling to find evidence that Barack Obama attended one of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s inflammatory sermons, which would contradict Obama’s claim that he never personally heard Wright make the kind of controversial statements that are currently circulating on YouTube.  I said in the previous post that it was a dangerous game for Obama to play and that in all likelihood somebody somewhere would be able to definitively disprove the claim within the month:

All it will take is one archived, decade-old tape of a sermon of Wright condemning America for something or another, and then the camera pans over to the pews where one of Trinity’s most prominent members is nodding his head but only half paying attention.

Yesterday, Newsmax gave it a shot, writing that one of its reporters attended a sermon with Obama on July 22, 2007:

In his sermon that day, Wright tore into America, referring to the “United States of White America” and lacing his sermon with expletives as Obama listened. Hearing Wright’s attacks on his own country, Obama had the opportunity to walk out, but Davis said the senator sat in his pew and nodded in agreement.

Bill Kristol of the New York Times quickly picked up on the Newsmax article, citing it in his own column without bothering to independently check the accuracy of story.  Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic, with the help of a little-known Internet research tool, was able to disprove Newsmax’s claim:

The truth is that Obama did not attend church on July 22.

He was on his way to campaign in Miami.

(Here is some video evidence.) This was before he signed an agreement forbidding himself from campaigning in Florida.

So the Newsmax article was proven wrong and Obama dodged a bullet, right?

Except…

It’s possible that the only error in the Newsmax story is the date in question.  It’s possible that a reporter did attend a service with Obama, where Rev. Wright did use expletives and decry “the United States of White America,” and where Obama did sit in his pew and nod his head (though probably much more out of politeness and church etiquette than agreement)– just not on July 22, 2007.

Although to be fair, it’s hard to imagine this scenario occuring at any time in 2007, let alone in July, five months after Obama removed Wright from the invocation of his campaign announcement event.  It’s hard to imagine Obama making the efforts he did in 2007 to distance himself from Wright, and then in the middle of the year throwing it all away.  But on the flip side, it’s not that difficult to imagine the scenario ocurring on, say, July 22, 2006.

At any rate, the Newsmax error (which has yet to be corrected on Newsmax.com or the New York Times web site) and the 20 other gotcha stories that will be written this month is the problem with Obama’s strategy of pretending to have no idea Rev. Wright held such inflammatory views.  A simple glimpse at his own church’s web site would have given him a clue, and a simple conversation with other congregants– or with Rev. Wright himself– could have filled in the rest.

Obama’s handling of the Wright controversy up to this point has been decidedly weak.  It was already a matter that called into question his perceived strengths of judgment and unity as well as his perceived weaknesses of patriotism and too-liberalism.  And with his decision to play dumb, it now calls into question his honesty as well.

Which is not to say that Obama is definitely being dishonest.  There is an outside chance that his ties to the church and his relationship with Wright have always been more remote than they’ve been portrayed.  Perhaps Obama played up those links in an effort to combat the Muslim smear or to gain favor with the Chicago South Side’s black community, and perhaps the truth is that he is merely an honorary member of Trinity, rarely attending services outside of Easter and Christmas.

But politics is mostly about perception, not reality.  And whatever the real story behind Obama’s relationship to Wright is, the unavoidable perception is that he’s giving the American people a little less than straight talk.