Below The Beltway

The uproar over race, and more specifically the divisive remarks of Jeremiah Wright, is giving Barack Obama his first real test of this campaign:

Democrats who worry that Barack Obama is untested can put their concerns to rest.

The inflammatory rhetoric of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has confronted Obama with the most severe test of his presidential campaign and, quite likely, of his public career.

He is now facing a full-blown and fast-moving political crisis in which his reputation as a leader with a singular ability to transcend racial divisions and unite Americans is in jeopardy.

A convergence of factors — a media firestorm, a Democratic rival eager to exploit his stumbles and, most of all, a Republican opposition eager to rough up the man they expect to face in the general election — have raised the stakes to new heights for Obama with the speech he will deliver in Philadelphia on Tuesday morning.

A successful address would go a long way toward answering Hillary Rodham Clinton’s complaint that Obama has never shown he can handle the rough-and-tumble nature of modern political combat.

A failure could leave many of the white independent voters — a key group behind Obama’s swift rise in national politics — doubting whether he is really the bridge-builder and healer he has portrayed himself to be.

Last night, Obama gave an interview that could be a preview of what we can expect this morning:

“To the extent that, you know, the conversation over the last couple of days has been dominated by some stupid statements that were made by Rev. Wright, but also caricatures of Rev. Wright and Trinity United Church of Christ — which, by the way, is part of a denomination that is overwhelmingly white — you know, I think that that has distracted us from the possibilities of moving beyond some of these arguments,” Obama said.

As he often does when confronted with controversy — such as the accusation that his own voting record and views are too liberal — Obama cast the debate in generational terms, suggesting that the criticism itself is an example of outdated old politics.

“I think that, you know, when you look at somebody like a Rev. Wright who grew up in the ’50s or ’60s, his experience of race in this country is very different than mine,” Obama told Ifill. “Now, we benefit from that past. We benefit from the difficult battles that were taking place. But I’m not sure that we benefit from continuing to perpetuate the anger and the bitterness that I think, at this point, serves to divide rather than bring us together. And that’s part of what this campaign has been about, is to say, ‘Let’s acknowledge a difficult history, but let’s move forward in a practical way to get things done.’”

The problem is that when you’re talking about some of the things that Wright has said —- that the United States deserved 9/11, for example — simply saying “he’s old, let’s move on” isn’t going to be enough for a significant segment of the people who have been voting for Obama this year, as recent polls have indicated. 

Obama’s task today is simple. He needs to explain to the American people how he could sit in a church pew every week for two decades and allow himself to be associated with what appears to reasonable people to be the hateful, racially tinged, and anti-American rhetoric of Jeremiah Wright. And he needs to disassociate from that rhetoric completely, otherwise, the campaign literature will write itself:

[The GOP] will blend together Wright’s fulminations with quotes of Michelle Obama saying her husband’s candidacy has made her finally proud of America with pictures of Obama himself sans the American flag on his lapel (the latter a point that has thrived in conservative precincts of the Web and talk radio).

In isolation, any of these might be innocuous. But in the totality of a campaign ad or brochure, the attacks could be brutal, replete with an unmistakable racial subtext.

It is not just the Wright episode that has damaged Obama. It’s also the environment in which the clips of his rants exploded across the airwaves and the Web. The Clinton camp has spent months raising questions about his judgment and authenticity. His relationship with Wright and handling of the controversy play right into Clinton’s hands — almost as if it were planned.

The comments of a pastor who married him, baptized his children, inspired the title of his book, advised him politically and ministered to him personally for two decades might not strike many voters as compatible with Obama’s post-partisan aura.

And that is what Obama needs to change, soon.