I like CNN commentator Roland Martin, even though I suspect he and I wouldn’t agree on much politically. But if even he thinks Jeremiah Wright “blew it” by being too “flippant,” then Wright’s National Press Club address and Q & A will really be hunting for any positive reviews.
I appeared with Martin on CNN after the Iowa caucuses, and due to him being by remote, he missed my sarcasm. You can explain a joke, but you can’t salvage it.
ROBERTS: Jim Geraghty, what do you think? I mean, Obama comes out of Iowa with a huge head of steam. Does Hillary Clinton have some real trouble trying to get her message across and catch up with them, or if we look back in 1992, and we saw that her husband finished in Iowa with only 2.8 percent of the vote, she’s probably got a pretty good chance somewhere along the line to make her mark.
JIM GERAGHTY, CONTRIBUTOR, NATIONAL REVIEW: Yes. Well, keep in mind that was Tom Harkin, who was the senator from Iowa that was running that year. So really nobody was competing that year. I’m not going to say she had a bad night. I’m just going to say, I think Britney Spears might have had a better one. It’s just one of those things where she was running on inevitability, at a certain coronation sense. And you know, without that, once you’ve demonstrated, you’ve been beaten, she is going to have to win on her sparkling personality.
MARTIN: John, I got to disagree with that. When you lose by nine points to Obama, you had a bad night. The guy sitting next to you is a former president of the United States, your husband, who is a standard bearer of the Democratic Party. You couldn’t win with him at your side? No, she had a bad night. Now, part of her problem is, you don’t know what she’s going to talk about.
ROBERTS: I think Jim was suggesting she had a bad night.
MARTIN: I’ll say a blowout night.
ROBERTS: But she, unlike Britney Spears, she at least, did not end up in the hospital.