The consensus is that Barack Obama’s candidacy has been wounded over the past six weeks. His partisans are enraged that he is taking heat for things said by his pastor (even as some Obama Kool-aid drinkers actually waste words trying to defend said pastor), and that he is asked questions of a non-substantive nature (as though there is anything remotely substantive in his own cotton-candy-and-brimstone speeches). Those who feared him now fear him less. Those who want Hillary to win are building strength for their case that she should be the nominee because he can’t make it to November.

Yes, these are bad days for Barack Obama, but the fact is, he’s lucky to have had them now. If he had knocked Hillary out of the race early and simply walked into the nomination, the media love affair with him would have been so profoundly deep that it would have taken months for the infatuation to dissipate even a little bit. At which point Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers and all of Obama’s baggage would have been hauled out of storage and become fodder not for a Democratic debate that angered liberals, but for a presidential debate in September or October with an audience of 100 million or more.

If Wright and Ayers had come to dominate the news in October, that would have spelled the end to Obama’s presidential hopes. The fact that they have dominated the news in April will, I suspect, prove to have been something of a lucky break. He was never going to get away without having to deal with his leftist and black-nationalist baggage, and if he had dealt with it three weeks before the election in the same manner he did in the weeks before the Pennsylvania primary, he would have collapsed faster than a left-brained person in a right-brained school system.

He’s not the Messiah any longer, but he can still win.