The revelations about Jeremiah Wright are so strange precisely because it’s next to impossible to imagine Barack Obama agreeing at all with this man’s incendiary remarks. I don’t think for a second that Obama’s cool demeanor is a put-on; that he’s masking some sort of pent-up anger and resentment. Yet Obama obviously respects Wright, and has for some time. This leaves me to consider what is it about Wright that so attracts Obama. And that leads me to some troubling conclusions.

Given everything that is known about Barack Obama, and the totality of what he has written and said, there is absolutely no reason to believe that he adheres to the racial grievance theory of America articulated by the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, whatever the Clintons might want to imply. Rather, the legitimate concern about Obama ought to be, and has always been, about his politics. Is he sympathetic to the hard left narrative of America, and if so, does this influence his views about the use of American power? The recent remarks of his wife suggest that he might; one hears a distinct echo of Wright in her statements about this country. Instead of worrying about what Obama knew and when he knew it, we should be asking him what he thinks of Harry Truman (strange that this titan of the anti-communist cause and the Democratic Party never appears anywhere in Obama’s rhetoric) and the way he went about ending World War II. That seems like a far more relevant, not to mention fair, question for a commander in chief than, “Do you agree with your Pastor that the government invented HIV to kill black people?”