I think Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin are on to some­thing about the sub­text of all this Ayers stuff bil­low­ing up out of the McCain cam­paign these days. Martin writes:

At best, this is to say that Obama doesn’t believe in Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism. At worst, and this is where the new ad goes, it means Obama doesn’t suf­fi­ciently love Amer­ica and is actu­ally apart from it.

And Smith concurs:

It’s not about an obscure ’60s rad­i­cal; it’s about chal­leng­ing Obama’s Amer­i­can­ness, which is why the lan­guage of the ads, delib­er­ately or inad­ver­tently, echoes the lan­guage of viral emails that do that more directly.

But in another sense, I think Martin and Smith stop a step too short in their analy­sis.

As a cod­i­cil to last night’s prob­a­bly ill-​advised expli­ca­tion de Mil­bank, may I sug­gest this post over at David Dayen’s D-Day blog. Dayen quotes a pretty eye-​opening exchange between the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza and Hard­ball host Chris Matthews. In it Matthews gives voice to the secret fear that Barack Obama and Jere­miah Wright are really the same person. (He even invokes Jekyll and Hyde.) Lizza argues—rather nobly, I’d sug­gest, but what do I know?—that jour­nal­ists might have some respon­si­bil­ity to work against that way of thinking:

LIZZA: There should be a prin­ci­ple in these cases in this cam­paign. There is no guilt by asso­ci­a­tion. This guy has one set of views, Obama has another set of views. If the views match up, then it’s fair game. But the guy’s been in pol­i­tics since the mid-90s. He has a record in the State Senate in Illi­nois. He has a record in the US Senate. He’s laid out an agenda as a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date. Where do his views match up with Jere­miah Wright’s? And why as jour­nal­ists are we con­fus­ing the two? It seems to me totally unfair that this guy is get­ting smeared with the views of some­one just because he’s his former pastor.

But Matthews will have none of it:

MATTHEWS: So every time you have a prob­lem with Barack, because you don’t really know him and he seems a little for­eign to you, you think of him as both these guys. They’re dif­fer­ent faces of the same guy. Jere­miah Wright to a lot of people is Barack Obama. They’ve become the same Chicago char­ac­ter run­ning for Pres­i­dent. One is the good doctor, the other is the mon­ster that shows up at night.

LIZZA: Look, I think there’s a danger of that hap­pen­ing. But as jour­nal­ists I think there’s a respon­si­bil­ity to make it clear…

MATTHEWS: OK, carve it apart, sep­a­rate the two. Try.

LIZZA: This guy went to a church. This guy is the pastor of that church. Now one of those guys is run­ning for Pres­i­dent and has laid out a vision that is rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent than any­thing his left-​wing pastor had to say. Yes, it tells you some­thing about who he is, it tells you some­thing about the com­mu­nity where he came from. But it doesn’t tell you any­thing, and nobody should con­fuse one with–

MATTHEWS: Do you think it might be hurt­ing a good man like Mitt Romney and his family, and good mem­bers of the LDS Church, that they’re being embar­rassed by this break­away group down in Texas in the last couple weeks? You don’t think that story hurts Mitt Romney’s chances of being on the ticket? Yes it does. So I’m saying, these asso­ci­a­tions, fair or unfair, birds of a feather, it’s the way people think.

“It’s the way people think”—by “people” Matthews means–or he thinks he means, anyway–the little people, the people out there in TV land, and espe­cially the working-​class white people in his beloved Penn­syl­va­nia. But as the Klein and Mil­bank pieces I quoted yes­ter­day show us, it’s really the “people” in the political-​media echo cham­ber he’s describing.

Which leads me to offer an odd kind of praise for Matthews. How­ever minor his value as a con­duit of actual news, you’ve at least got to give him credit for this: he seems to be a pretty accu­rate mouth­piece for the id of the national media. All the irra­tional hopes, desires, and fears that most jour­nal­ists are too pro­fes­sional to ever cop to openly come tum­bling from Matthews’s mouth on a near nightly basis.

Today, in a post­ing on his “Rough Sketch” blog at the Wash­ing­ton Post Dana Mil­bank per­pe­trated one of the most grotesque exam­ples of hatchet jour­nal­ism I’ve seen in a while. I’ll get to the par­tic­u­lars soon enough, but first it’s worth set­ting a little context.

Mil­bank was report­ing on the Rev­erend Jere­miah Wright’s speech at the National Press Club this morn­ing, a speech that marked the third public appear­ance of Barack Obama’s former pastor in the last couple of days. The first appear­ance came on Friday, when Wright appeared in a PBS inter­view with Bill Moyers. The second came yes­ter­day, when he spoke at the Detroit NAACP’s Free­dom Fund dinner.

The Moyers inter­view was so uncon­tro­ver­sial that one com­men­ta­tor had to wonder why we hadn’t heard more about it. But the question-and-answer period after today’s Press Club speech gave the media just the kind of thing it was wait­ing for. Joe Klein of Time said that “Wright’s pur­pose now seems quite clear: to aggran­dize him­self–the guy is going to be a go-​to main­stream media source for racial extrem­ist spew, the next iter­a­tion of Al Sharp­ton–and destroy Barack Obama.” Amy Sul­li­van, also at Time, said bluntly that Wright’s per­for­mance at the National Press Club “can only be described as a polit­i­cal disaster.”

Only small-t time will tell if Sul­li­van is right–one sign she’s cor­rect is that Obama is already inch­ing his way onto the denounce-and-reject road. [UPDATE 4/29: The inches have become miles.] But it only takes one look at the tran­script of Wright’s appear­ance at the Press Club to see that Klein’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of it as “racial extrem­ist spew” is ridiculous.

Milbank’s post is worst of all.

My friend Ben Cal­houn did a nice NPR story on Jere­miah Wright this last week­end. Listen to it here.