Truth be told, it remains to be seen if the performance by Obama's pastor at the National Press Club will affect his campaign in Indiana and ,more likely, North Carolina. There are three issues in the ongoing J. Wright controversy that have not been dealt with as extensively as the theatrics of the pastor and the presidential candidate himself. These three issues predict the onset of other problems which are going to affect Obama winning the nomination. These issues I will deal with here are:

1) How the handling of Reverend Wright controversy and the numerous other unanswered questions about Obama associates draws into question how adroit his campaign actually is and how much of his ascent was the pure combination of luck and zeitgeist.

2) We are seeing a mandate for the end of racially polarizing politics.

3) We are witnessing the danger of the deep desire on the American left to create hagiographic stories around candidates.

I will deal with the last point first.

I would argue this trope of hagiography started with Ralph Nader in 2000 and the demonization of Al Gore as a moderate 'just like Bush.' Celebrity leftists got on board with Nader, without ever really thinking about how their statements of the two parties being 'the same' could stand up under scrutiny if one looked at the political differences between the Democrats and Republicans with an eye for spotting nuances. In 2004, this same sort of hagiography rose up around Howard Dean with the candidate crashing fabulously after his first incredible gaffe.

The reason Hillary has been able to endure 'Sinbad-in-Serbiagate' is because she has not been treated with a political Palm Sunday. She has been positioned as what she actually is, a policy wonk with a long history of battling the right wing creep towards a completely laisze faire economic system in America. Hence, when she reveals her human frailty in the propensity we all have to lie, she does not have as far to fall as Barack Obama.

The unfortunate result of this unquestioning adulation is the Democrats may have indeed lost their best candidate and someone who could have been, after the kinks are worked out, a real proponent for change in Washington.

When I saw the Shepard Ferry of Obey fame-produced images of Obama, looking heavenward with an earnest face go up all over Philadelphia, I knew Obama's campaign was starting to dangerously believe the messianic buzz created by the Obama adherents. While they were great from an advertising standpoint and the continued building of the Obama brand, (interesting but not surprising that the most advertising-influence presidential campaign in history was glorified in the pages of Adbusters), a presidential candidate is not soup or soda. After a while  - no matter how much the Facebook generation wants to resist the creep of deep, footnoted academics over PowerPoint presentation lessons in civics - we are all going to be forced to read the fine print.

Fine print leads me back to the first point about how Obama's campaign has addressed the increasingly apparent poison that is Jeramiah Wright acting like someone having a manic episode off their medication, (which I would assert is the real problem Wright presents to Obama's enduring credibility.)

1. Obama's campaign: have they all been out to Starbucks (or maybe Argo Tea?)

Obama's campaign has been absolutely horrible at two things. First, they do an abysmal job of telling robust stories that remove their candidate from shared culpability with his questionable associates. Second, they seem to not be able to tell alternate stories that could work in brightening up the fairly tale as it goes Brothers Grimm.

The operative on Obama's campaign who is responsible for watching media across the board, looking at portrayals of the Senator, is a graduate of Calvin College, a formidable Christian college in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Calvin is affiliated with a number of moderate, racially integrated churches on the South Side of Chicago such as the Roseland Christian Ministries Center. These churches have strong relationships with Obama, he often has visited them instead of his church, and these relationships could have been exploited to counter the associations with out-of-step radicalism that the Wright relationship implied. Those of us who have been watching Obama's career and know it intimately from our own origins on the South Side have wondered why the campaign has not rolled out alternative stories.

A Dutch television program is the only media outlet to have covered Obama from the perspective of his extensive work in maintaining racial diversity in Chicago's South Suburbs, (Story here: http://nwi.com/articles/2007/02/06/news/ illiana/docdc7212d754d78ffb8625727a000c1 7ad.txt).
Where did these stories that involve reasonable, everyday Americans, both black and white, go?

(For all the Obamabots out there wringing their hands, I called Nathan Brackett of Rolling Stone volunteering these stories but he is too good to speak to the person who gave him his first editorial position.)

During the ascent of the Reverend Wright story and the other controversies that are beginning to jump out of the marginalized blogs and out of the basements of the so-called vast, right-wing conspiracy, Obama's campaign has been completely out to lunch. Sure they might have been building a positive campaign but building a positive campaign about the issues does not mean avoiding calls to pit bull fights by one's opponents. They could have answered the ugliness in a proactive way by providing the many media outlets who were having a love affair with Obama before Pennsylvania other stories that told voters of a different Obama. In the process, they would have given the candidate even more depth and worked the campaign away from rock stardom to the bedrock that is needed to run someone in the general election.

Evidently, they stayed out at Starbucks too long, decided to hit a few bars for happy hour and thought the whole affair would run itself with Chris Mathews providing nerf-ball soft blushing assessments of their candidate well into November, they wouldn't have to do the hard work.

The real problem is Obama's campaign should have worked with the progressive blogosphere in creating proactive strategies by leaking the possible negative stories with enough informational provision for a positive spin. Having the co-founder of Facebook on your side isn't enough, one has to delve into modified James Carville as well.

Maybe Obama's candidacy, outside from the branding and heightened graphic design, was not as new and innovative as we thought. Maybe lots of their success had to do with luck and a media that refused to ask tough questions until Pennsylvania, after they were forced to out of the threat of losing the last shred of journalistic credibility the U.S. media has left.

One of the big issues they should have been dealing with from the beginning is the eventual ugly head of Chicago's racially polarizing politics popping up like Al Sharpton with a beehive hair-doo.

2. The mandate to end racially-polarizing politics

Chicago's Black political machine, not unlike the machine built by Sharpe James in Newark, New Jersey, has trafficked in absurd hatred of whites as a tactic to mask that the community's leaders were not doing anything for the poorest of the poor or anyone who was socially disenfranchised. Blaming 'whitey' or McGhee or whatever one wanted to call the 'cracker-asses' one was doing back-door deals with was a way to distract people from the fact that the lot of them were inept and were spending most of their time giving jobs to relatives, instead of developing the continued legacy of the civil rights movement which was absolute about racial integration.

Barack Obama seemed like a steady bright light among a lot of rediculous flashing Christmas bulbs. Unfortunately, in order to play the game to get to the point of some version of reform, he had to engage in the us versus them mentality that is pervasive in so many urban communities. It is unfortunate that Obama did not, more early on, take up the torch of Harold Washington and his broad coalition instead of embedding himself among the angry black leadership that dominates the South Side.

There are actually three machines in Illinois. At the top is the Springfield machine run by the governor's office in both parties and Speaker of the Illinois House, Michael Madigan. The Republicans run their side of the machine out of DuPage County. It's a softer mall-land version but just as vicious if you cross it. In the middle is the Chicago machine and at the bottom is the South Side African American machine headed by the Stroger family - Obama political mentor Emil Jones is only a proxy of the Stroger machine.

My family is involved in this machine. I have seen them do unspeakable things, things like pay off the Westmont police to prevent them from arresting my gang-banger step-brother for making sexual advances at 14 year old girls. My father was the only semi-clean one in the bunch but I moved away from the whole morass because I disagreed with the dishonest living one had to be involved in to get ahead in Chicago. As a person more focused on private business, I felt the Black and Latino political class of Chicago benefited a few while oppressing the many who did not have connections.

I would highly recommend everyone reading Mike Royko's classic 'Boss' to understand how black churches on Chicago's South Side are attached to the City Hall machine.

Many Generation X and Generation Y African-Americans and Latinos have been trying to escape the grasp of the angry at whitey black political class. However, to speak out against this is to be branded as an apologist and to risk social isolation. Within the in group, one is not rewarded in the least bit for going 'post-racial.' Even worse, the far left whites who engage these circles encourage the divisive behavior.

Experiencing this social isolation in a city like Chicago where hardcore hatred still exists and public integration is near zero can make existence miserable. One has to go to the East Coast or another area of the country where race relations has moved further along.

Barack Obama never engaged in the sort of viciousness his colleagues in black South Side leadership reveled in but he did not work to vocally change it. This is the first step I have always thought our new generation of leaders would have to take before taking institutions like the White House and leading brown skinned Americans to full enfranchisement.

If the stank that Wright has lent to the authenticity of Barck Obama's back story turns to fast rot and ends up being the deciding factor in tanking his candidacy, this will serve as a mandate for us as 13% of the American polity to abandon the mode of bitter isolation all together. We will finally have to take the high road Dr. Martin Luther King directed us to decades ago.

Believe it or not, many -- I believe the great majority -- white people want to get to know us. When I move through the world with my current girlfriend, outside of our respective ethnic communities, I get a general feeling that white people are genuinely happy and therefore generous to be around two black folks who treat them with good will and have not rebuffed American mainstream - or in our case, 'indie' culture - for the sake of proving some sort of racial authenticity. While both of us have had the American black experience that allows us to see Rev. Wright as a magnificent speaker, we squarely separate ourselves from participating from speaking one way in front of whites and another way around other black folk. This is not just because we are mix-ed folks, lots of us 'mulattoes' engage in the authenticity game.

We force ourselves to be fully enfranchised and maybe engage in a bit of self-delusion because it is not only good for us but good for society. Race is not only erased by confronting it but by ignoring that it matters in such a deliberate way that it eventually disappears.

I do not think it is naive to subscribe to the Lenny Bruce theory of  social and actual miscegenation as a tactic for healing from racial wounds in America. To many of us, it appeared Barack Obama was doing just that but the continued re-emergence of Reverend Wright, the unfair painting of the Clintons' as covertly racist and the snubbing of Latinos and the LGBT community has made even some true believers wonder if Barack Obama's rainbow was really made of sunshine instead of stage lighting.

I would not be sad if the Rev. Wright controversy did destroy Obama because I think a broader lesson would come out of it for America: the lesson that we need to focus on commonalities instead of differences and change the conversation about poverty to include the marginalized of all races.

This leads to the last lesson, the lesson the left has long needed to learn: stop creating supposedly super-human candidates who have magical leftist powers to make us all happy, vintage bike riding peaceniks.

Part of what is taking down Barack Obama is his messianic rise became annoying, especially as it became a formal part of the campaign as it advanced into Pennsylvania.

This hagiography led to another sad turn that has not been talked about yet but will: the Obama campaign getting into legal trouble and getting reported to Federal Authorities, the Federal Election Commission and the Democratic Party because it's adherents were willing to do anything to destroy the big evil Hillary dragons who were trying to advance some sort of boring debate about hardcore policy and spoil the rock concerting onto the White House. It was a fervent revival of the 60's for them, not a campaign firmly rooted in 2008.

This by-any-means-necessary-for-our-savior mentality mixed with the persistent corruption in Chicago (that Barack Obama should have worked on first before aspiring for the White House).

Over the course of the past few months governmental agencies in the City of Chicago and the State of Illinois have stopped pursuing any complaints against individuals associated with Senator Obama or individuals who have donated to his campaign. Furthermore, the Obama campaign has failed to enumerate donated services, time or goods as campaign contributions.

When Hillary's campaign invited her 'Hill Stars', ardent volunteer supporters to Iowa, they sent out paperwork for those individuals to add up hotel stays and any other expenses as campaign donations, as they legally should be. One of the edges Obama's campaign has maintained in fund raising is not putting the same restraints on non-cash donations to the Obama campaign. Why should they? It was building a movement. Sorry to say, even movements are subject to laws.

Supporters of the Obama campaign in Chicago have also continued to hold lavish parties where Chicagoans of note have been giving money to the campaign far beyond the legal limit through untracked party attendance, each party held by a different stakeholder in the Mayor Daley cabal. People in Chicago who have been trying to advance complaints against some of these particular donors have gotten wind of these parties, noted repeated party attendance that added up to donating above McCain-Feingold limits by the people they were complaining about to governmental agencies and have reported the inaction of Illinois agencies as well as the campaign finance irregularities to overseeing Federal entities as a way to advance their own cases.

When people are bilked, they aren't worried about change or hope, they're worried about getting back what they deserve, what they are promised by labor laws and other forms of rule of law.

Didn't we all see that coming? Again, this leads me to the first question: is the Obama campaign adroit enough to respond or have they been out to happy hour for so long that they can't run back to the office to append this crisis and recover their candidate at 10:30 p.m. on Thursday night?

We will see what happens before May 6th. I'm not making any predictions but I'm certainly gathering the lessons I need to learn, personally, from this.

As a post-script, I also look forward to all the responses which will misconstrue this diary as automatically anti-Obama because it does not attack Wright's attackers or continue to make absolutist claims about Obama that might have endured in the pre-Wright election world.

Don't the writers and adherents of the hagiography get that half the reason people post anti-Obama stuff is to watch the crazy angry responses propagate in the comments on MyDD? Funny how all cults ultimately cannibalize themselves.

Hopefully, more than anything else, we are seeing the cult of racial resentment as a culture finally devour it's own tail. I cannot, and you cannot, brothers and sisters, continue to assert a specialness out of oppression in a country where our experience is really only 13% of the larger, marvelous experience that is America.

This is the real MoveOn.org we need in this country. Now move it move it before we as Democrats snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.