The Wright Stuff?

Barack Obama gives a major speech on race today, and it has the feel of a turning point.

Despite some major media outlets playing down or ignoring the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy, it's all over cable and the blogs and gaining significant traction, particularly at the water-cooler level.

It's not that I think the Illinois senator should be tarred with every eccentric or anti-American ranting by the reverend (the United States of KKK, the government invented AIDS and so on). But if Wright has been Obama's friend for two decades, presided at his wedding and baptized his daughters, it's hard to swallow the idea that the candidate wasn't in any way familiar with some of the man's more extreme rhetoric.

Obama's problem is that he's still in the process of introducing himself to the country. The Wright albatross could weigh him down among those who don't know much about him or weren't quite comfortable with him.

It would be bad enough if we just had transcripts of Wright's uglier broadsides. But the fact that there's video means it can replay as an endless loop on television, especially on Fox. And that comes at a time when Hillary Clinton is doing better among white voters.

Obama has run a remarkable campaign in getting to the point where he's the Democratic front-runner. He will need all of his considerable skill to deal with this mess.

"Faced with what his advisers acknowledged was a major test to his candidacy," says the New York Times, "Senator Barack Obama sought on Monday to contain the damage from incendiary comments made by his pastor and prepared to address the issue of race more directly than at any other moment of his presidential campaign."

Too bad the Times thought this was worth only an item last Friday. Of course, that's more than The Washington Post ran, but at least my paper gave the story front-page play Saturday, while the Times stuck it inside.

"With his address in Philadelphia today," says the Chicago Tribune, "the senator from Illinois faces a moment in his campaign as pivotal as the one that John F. Kennedy, the party's nominee for president in 1960, confronted in explaining his Catholicism to a Baptist audience in Houston. Republican Mitt Romney's attempt at explaining his independence from the Mormon church last year sounded only a pale echo of that challenge."

Marc Ambinder fact-checks Bill Kristol and prompts a correction. Kristol, citing the conservative site Newsmax, wrote in the NYT that Obama was at the Trinity church July 22 when Wright railed about the "arrogance" of "the United States of White America." Turns out he wasn't.

"The error is in trusting the source without checking," Ambinder writes. "The truth is that Obama did not attend church on July 22. He was on his way to campaign in Miami."

Kristol's column, and the correction: