We have turned into a nation of news junkies. The news is beamed via cable into our homes, airports, restaurants, and classrooms 24/7. There is such a tidal wave of news that many American find it hard to ferret out the big story from the small one. However horrific the pictures, eventually they are reduced to a banality as we have seen with suicide bombings, the intractable conflicts between the Israelis and the Palestinians, hurricanes, floods and the protracted conflict in Iraq. Sadly, banality leads to detachment unless it impacts you directly.

Recently there has been an avalanche of very bad news, mostly on the economic front. The mortgage mess has spread like a cancer throughout the economy, a barrel of oil topped out at $110, the once almighty dollar is trading at an all-time low, and on Wall Street the great banking house of Bear Stearns collapsed, only to be bailed out by the government, the first time this has happened since the Great Depression. Inflation and unemployment applications are on the rise. This is the big story and since it impacts every American, it has not been reduced to a banality.

Presidential candidates Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain understand this. They fully grasp that as the economy deteriorates, Iraq will no longer be the big story. They also know that anything relating to their personal lives can easily be pushed aside in a news environment where a story pregnant with problems can easily become a banality once the talking heads get their hands on it, providing the evidence is debatable within the context of a plastic culture characterized by relativism. Much of it has to do with the person’s image and the gravity of the situation. Former New York state Gov. Spitzer was dead in the water the moment it was revealed he was “Client Number 9.”  He used up his well of goodwill long ago. Another person in that situation who was seen by the public as a “nice person” may have gotten off the hook by admitting lapses in judgment accompanied with the promise of good works and intensive psychotherapy. Obama falls into the “good guy” category.

In the eyes of millions, Obama is the incarnation of goodness, a latter-day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They see a man who has made up for the lack of experience needed to run the nation with good judgment, a healer who has bridged the racial and class divides that has haunted this nation for so long, and a person who encapsulates the American story, a 21^st century Horatio Alger who started with little and has gone a great distance. Both he and those who see in him Lincoln, King and JFK rolled into one person understand the power of banality.

The tapes showing the leader of his church, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are shocking. The emotion he devoted to denouncing his nation, his deliberate spacing of words and sentences to heighten the audience’s emotion, and the sweat pouring off his brow reminds one of Adolf Hitler, first in the beerhalls of Munich and later at Nuremberg. The content of Wright’s sermons has more in common with what we hear coming out of the Islamic Fundamentalist mosques in the Middle East than the usual Sunday sermon in the churches that dot our landscape. The good reverend is no Martin Luther King Jr., whose name candidate Obama is forever evoking. Had the late civil rights leader heard these sermons, he would have stood up in the church and decried this offering to help pay for a trip into the wilderness.

Candidate Obama is not made of the same stuff. No more or no less than his female opponent, he is the consummate politician who in time will simply know that the law of banality will permit him to say it is just another “dust-up.” Obama refers to Wright as a friend, mentor, “Uncle,” and spiritual advisor. It is incomprehensible that he did not know the depth of Rev. Wright’s departures from the accepted norms of civility, his gut-felt hatreds, and venomous views. This is hardly just another "dust-up," but Obama knows a fundamental truth about Americans and the media in today’s rapidly changing environment with the economy on the brink: Americans have other things on their mind. Most of the media moguls will give him a good conduct pass, and many will ask, “What else is new?” After all, the story that appeared in The New York Times about McCain’s undocumented private life is now ancient history.

However, the Rev. Wright story is a very big one. After all, Obama is not running for some local position. If the super delegate tides move in his direction in Denver or before, one can only imagine what the Republican media machine will do with the tapes of Rev. Wright and Obama dismissing them as just another “dust-up” by the progenitors of the old politics. Obama has much to account for in his relationship with Rev. Wright. Just as the Chicago-based pastor has not lived up to the moral authority of his first name, the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, Obama has not measured up to the standards of Dr. King, our nation’s Jeremiah, who expected a higher standard.

-- Professor of History Sander A. Diamond