The flap over the pulpit remarks of Rev. Jeremiah Wright was disturbing on many fronts, but Barack Obama's handling of it certainly solidified my support for him.
Full disclosure: I'm a lifelong Republican, have worked for many Republican candidates, and have held positions of responsibility in my state's party organization. My interest in the Illinois Senator began before he announced his candidacy.
My reading has led me to believe he's the Real Thing. Such an interesting candidate for the Presidency is rare indeed; I believe that his potential for accomplishment in the White House is enormous and quite unlike any other person in living memory. Some of what he will likely do worries me as I am not liberal in my thinking on many issues. But in the main, he'll do great things.
But what I want to say here is that, in my opinion, the big media coverage of the Rev. Wright sermons has been unseemly and foolish. Playing the same snippets of disturbing speech over and over, almost gleefully, the coverage has been certainly embarrassing and slanted to reveal a sort of curious whiteness. Watching, it felt like being in the room when some dope says "hey, some of my best friends are colored!"
Many whites (certainly many CNN anchors) have never attended services at a church with a black congregation. The experience of Sunday services is quite different in many predominantly African-American churches than you'll likely find at the Lutheran church on the corner. Who says all church services have to look and sound like some white guy's ideal of quiet Protestantism? I got the feeling that the white media anchors were not so upset by Wright's sermons as they were surprised at what the service itself looked like.
There was never any question whether Barack Obama shared any of the regrettable opinions of his pastor. They went against the spirit and the letter of the Senator's written and spoken record. For me, the test came in how he might handle the controversy.
A garden-variety, say-anything-to-save-your-skin politician would have thrown his own mother to the wolves at the first hint of trouble. The easy thing would have been to completely distance himself from and "disown" Wright and probably call for an investigation into his private associations. But this pastor is someone whose heart Obama knows and should know. He conducted the Obama's marriage, baptized their children and provided the soaring inspiration for Obama's work in The Audacity of Hope. Rev. Wright, though the content of some of his sermons was certainly questionable, had a long and successful ministry. He deserved to be disagreed with respectfully. A candidate of character would do so. A politician more of Mrs. Clinton's stripe would find a way to keep her hands clean, while throwing him under the nearest bus.
To have thrown over Rev. Wright completely would have been an ugly demonstration of disloyalty, ambition over personal dignity and respect for those who have gotten him where he now stands.
Obama not only handled the situation correctly and gracefully, he used the occasion to demonstrate that his thinking on the state of the Union in terms of race relations is entirely balanced and reasonable.
He's the Real Thing. And he has shown that he has enormous strength of character.
Knowing that you may be googling for this sort of thing, I have a few words about my experience with the 
The 1912 Presidential election began with Theodore Roosevelt's
displeasure with Taft, his chosen successor. The Republican convention
for the nomination that year was prepared to go for Roosevelt; Taft's
supporters effectively kept them out of the hall, ensuring that TR
would be cut out of the process. Roosevelt bolted the convention and
began his own, third-party candidacy. Had Taft bowed out of the 1912
election in favor of the much more popular Roosevelt, TR would easily
have beaten Wilson in a two-man race and with an unsplit Republican
party. Having TR in charge might well have either seen a diplomatic
answer to European tensions leading to WWI, or a lessened war itself
due to his early and vigorous entry of the USA into the thick of it.
Come War's end, he would never have been drawn into the treaties that
forced the economic strangulation of Germany, which would have denied
Hitler the unrest he needed to build wounded German Nationalism into
National Socialism. It also might well have prevented the toppling of
the Tzar because the severe difficulties that led to the Russian
Revolution might have been averted with a shortened WWI. No crushed
Germany, no Hitler. No Hitler, no Final Solution, no Holocaust. Also no
Cold war, no Mao Zedong, no WWII, no Lenin, no Soviet Union, probably
no Korea or Vietnam. Not to mention no misguided Prohibition and the
resulting rise of organized crime - maybe even the saved lives of millions who died in the 1917 influenza epidemic, spread rapidly by the soldiers of the Great War.
Like many of his generation, he really didn't talk much about his war experiences, except for the stock stories. 
I understand that they come from a place where children die in abundance of disease, or butchery. Perhaps it it just fantastic imagination, or a subconscious way of fitting them into the faded quilt of life in a tiny Ohio city. The juxtaposition of amish buggy and Mayan exotic is not easily absorbed, so one looks for a way to make them fit. This must seem like paradise, after what he's been through.
With a company where I used to work, one of my jobs was looking after the ca. 1910 mansion that had become the main offices of the company, a monthly newspaper/ad rag. I was given this task because of a certain knowledge of the building's history, an interest in architecture, etc. 
Reposting this, somehow lost from the archives. Originally written April/04:
