It took me a while to figure out why the fracas about minister Jeremiah Wright undermines Mr. Obama so thoroughly. It cuts to the most fundamental claims about the senator's character. Obama presents himself as a candidate who invites us to bridge ethnic, economic, and partisan divisions, and a man of great integrity who insists that his fellow campaigners adhere to high standards of conduct and demeanor.
However, he was willing to spend twenty years under the spiritual tutelage of a racist who espouses insane theories, in a congregation that made ethnocentrism and opposition to "middleclassness" its principles. He stayed in that congregation and subjected his children to the man's bizarre teaching, which he insists he doesn't believe, out of opportunism, in order to secure his status in Chicago black-community politics.
Six weeks ago, the Senator was entrancing crowds, and they were ready to make him emperor, but now the emperor has no clothes.
He can't really use the Kerry (that's my faith and I believe it, but I can't stand up for it publicly) defense, since the evident racism in Rev. Wright's comments will sink him if he assents to it. Will it stop the swooning and messiah-luster ascribed to him? Only time will tell.