I drink to make other people amusing,” the humorist O. Henry once said, and I suppose that tactic might work as an antidote to most bores one might encounter in the daily give-and-take of life.

But after watching television news clips of the hyperactive Rev. Jeremiah Wright ranting about how the U.S. government invited the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and invented HIV as a means of genocide against minorities, I’m guessing that it would take more than a snootful of Old Rotgut these days for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to find his former patron even mildly entertaining.

Wright, pastor of the Chicago church that Obama has attended for the past 20 years, implied in well-publicized remarks before the National Press Club that Obama secretly concurs with his controversial views. That presumably provoked Obama to finally sever his ties with the man who has become a millstone around the neck of the Obama campaign.

Calling Wright’s most recent comments “a bunch of rants that aren’t grounded in truth,” Obama angrily accused the minister of excessively enjoying his allotted 15 minutes of fame at the expense of the Obama candidacy. Wright’s comments “offend me, rightly offend all Americans, and they should be denounced. That’s what I’m doing very clearly and unequivocally today,” Obama said.

“The outrageousness of his performance during the question-and-answer period yesterday [at the National Press Club] shocked me,” Obama said of Wright. “I don’t think anybody could attribute those beliefs to me.”

The jury may still be out on that one. That murmur you may have heard in the background was the reaction of a mystified electorate wondering what had taken the man so long to distance himself from a loose cannon that one might logically suppose would have been heaved overboard early on.

Ironically, Wright may have provided an explanation when he told reporters, “If Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected. Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls.”

The reference was to remarks Obama had made in a major speech at Philadelphia on race relations after Wright had become an issue in the campaign because of video that had surfaced featuring his more controversial sermons. In that speech, Obama seemed to cave in to a politician’s natural predisposition toward wanting to have things both ways, denouncing the pastor’s ideas but not the man. He could no more disown Wright than he could disown his own grandmother, Obama said.

Like so many supposedly unequivocal declarations in the Machiavellian world of big-time politics, that policy is now null and void. Your guess is as good as mine as to where that leaves Grandma.

The episode serves to remind that our marathon political campaigns for high public office, impossibly tedious and often sidetracked by distractions of the Rev. Wright kind, don’t necessarily prepare the winners for tending to what the late Baltimore Sun columnist H.L. Mencken called “the intricate problems of statecraft.”

Dealing with those problems requires a high degree of technical proficiency accompanied by an unyielding kind of integrity, “for the temptations of a public official are almost as cruel as those of a glamour girl or a dipsomaniac,” Mencken told a Columbia University audience in a 1940 lecture on politics included in “A Mencken Chrestomathy” published by Random House.

Alas, we train a candidate for facing those problems “not by locking him up in a monastery and stuffing him with wisdom and virtue, but by turning him loose on the stump,” Mencken declared. “If he is a smart and enterprising fellow, which he usually is, he quickly discovers there that hooey pleases the boobs a great deal more than sense. Indeed, he finds that sense really disquiets and alarms them – that it makes them, at best, intolerably uncomfortable, just as a tight collar makes them uncomfortable, or a speck of dust in the eye, or the thought of Hell.

“The truth, to the overwhelming majority of mankind, is indistinguishable from a headache. After trying a few shots of it on his customers, the larval statesman concludes sadly that it must hurt them, and after that he taps a more humane keg, and in a little while the whole audience is singing ‘Glory, glory, hallelujah,’ and when the returns come in the candidate is on his way to the White House.”

Were he to return from beyond the grave today to lecture about politicians and we who elect them, the old master wordsmith wouldn’t have to change a thing in his script.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may e-mail him at

olddawg@bangordailynews.net.