Obama's Sister Souljah

Jackson was a guest on a Fox News show Sunday and, while off camera, didn't realize that his microphone was on. The network made a recording of the longtime civil rights leader expressing a vulgar wish to castrate the putative Democratic presidential nominee over remarks he had made concerning the need for some young black fathers to behave more responsibly toward their families.

Now, nobody much past the age of reason actually expects many of the public men and women on those shows to say what they really think. (Doing that makes you a "character" or a "curmudgeon," which is a whole other niche.) Still, the gap between Jackson's on-camera comments and his unguarded remarks was pretty sobering -- not simply for their crudity but also for the depth of hostility they betrayed toward a candidate he claims to support.

What to make of the decision to air them is another issue. Suffice it to say that given the way professional talking heads such as Jackson show up on one of these pestilentially numerous cable news chat shows after another, it's a wonder things like this don't happen more often. Moreover, if you're a liberal Democrat and you willingly go on Fox News ... well, when you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas -- if you're lucky.

Jackson subsequently has fallen on his rhetorical sword, apologizing profusely and unreservedly, and it's likely that the whole incident has been a net plus for Obama -- a kind of indirect and genteel Sister Souljah moment. The reference, of course, is to Bill Clinton's denunciation of certain intemperate comments the rap singer by that name made during the 1992 presidential campaign. It's widely believe that Clinton's "courage" in that instance helped him with blue-collar white voters by showing he was not "pandering" to African American voters, who are such an essential part of the Democratic Party's electoral base. Jackson's intemperance simply draws attention to Obama's positions that are likely to strike a similar chord with swing voters.

The onetime presidential candidate particularly objected to the personal-responsibility component in Obama's version of a faith-based initiative, arguing that it amounted to "talking down to black people." He also objected to the senator's Father's Day address, when he said some young African American fathers needed "to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child; it's the courage to raise one."