When's It Gonna Rain?

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My pastor's sermon yesterday reminded me of a movie.

Things that make me think often have that kind of influence on me. I don't know why that is. But that seems to be the way my mind works.

And the movie that came to my mind as I listened to my pastor's words was the movie "Leap of Faith," the story of a faith healer who, as it turns out, has little faith in his own ability to heal. In fact, his healing powers tend to be enhanced by the technology that is in the hands of his assistant.

In the movie, the traveling revival show is stranded in a bump–in–the–road kind of rural town in Kansas, a town that is crippled by high unemployment and a devastating drought that threatens to ruin the year's crops. Because times are so hard, the sheriff is reluctant to allow anything like a revival show in town that will separate the poor and the struggling from what little cash they have.

Nevertheless, the show is allowed to proceed, and, when the faith healer works the crowd with his assistant's help, he amazes everyone with his "knowledge" of things he couldn't possibly know. If you have never seen the movie, the video clip I have attached to this post will give you an idea of the kind of high–tech con game they were playing.

I couldn't find a clip of the scene that came to my mind during my pastor's sermon so I'll have to describe it to you. The faith healer's assistant, wearing a hidden microphone, goes out in the crowd and gets people to whisper their concerns to her; back on the stage, the faith healer hears everything with a hidden earpiece.

For the most part, the problems that are brought to the assistant seem to be routine, everyday problems. I don't mean to minimize them. I just mean to say that they're the kinds of problems that faith healers must encounter on a regular basis. Then — predictably, I suppose — the assistant comes upon a man in the audience who asks her, "When's it gonna rain?" The assistant says, "This man asks a question that is on the minds of everyone here."

So, when my pastor spoke of a Bible passage from Luke, in which fishermen had been casting their nets all night with nothing to show for it and were about to call it quits when Jesus encouraged them to try again, he used it as an opportunity to remind his listeners of the value of perseverance.

"How long?" is the question people ask. The context differs from one person to the next. It isn't even verbally expressed by some. But it's the question that is on all minds. And for many who ask it — or merely think it — everything else is on hold until there is an answer.

How long must we endure illness or hardship? How long before the economy improves? How long before there are jobs for the unemployed? How long must we sacrifice? How long must we defer our hopes and our dreams?

How long?

My pastor may be especially sensitive to this question right now. He was personally affected by the earthquake in Haiti because he served in missions there. Then, a week ago, a member of the congregation — a fairly new member, actually — committed suicide.

When I heard about the suicide, the first thing I wondered was whether she was unemployed. Being unemployed myself — and having worried about the danger posed by joblessness, as well as the stigma some people insist on attaching to decisions made by the isolated and the irrational, for more than a year — I guess it was only natural that it was the first thought that came to my mind.

But, apparently, she was not unemployed. Whatever drove her to end her life, joblessness was not behind it.

My pastor says he has concluded, from his conversations with her family members and those in the congregation who knew her, that no red flags were missed. We may never know why she killed herself.

People commit suicide for many reasons. And it is true that not everyone who attempts a suicide is successful. Sometimes that is by design. Sometimes it really is a "cry for help."

But some people reach the conclusion that there is no help for them, that no restorative rain is going to fall in their lives.

That's the crisis of confidence in America today. And I hope my prediction, that prolonged unemployment will lead to a spike in the suicide rate, will not come to pass.

As there always are these days, there are plenty of people in the media who hailed Friday's jobs report — which told us that the unemployment rate went down even though 20,000 jobs were lost — as an indicator that the economy is turning the corner. But there are few in the media, besides Bob Herbert of the New York Times, who will tell the truth. It is a truth that most incumbents don't want to hear because it speaks of years of sacrifice and hard work — and those aren't the things politicians like to talk about when they are asking for votes.

But what is the alternative? More deception? More talk about the American dream? If so, it better be good. For more and more Americans, the American dream is getting farther out of reach with each passing day.

When's it gonna rain?

The Sunny Slopes of Long Ago

When I went to church this morning, I must admit that I expected my pastor to speak about the famous people who died this week — Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson.

I wasn't sure what he was going to say, but I pondered the prospect as I drove to church. Would he speak of the uncertainty of life? He could have — and it certainly would have been poignant today, given the fact that, upon returning home, I learned that another famous person, TV pitchman Billy Mays, was found dead at his Florida home this morning. Mays wasn't as well known as the other three, but millions were familiar with his booming voice from his infomercials.

As with Jackson, Mays (who also was 50) did not appear to be a victim of foul play, but there are reports that he was hit on the head when the airplane in which he was riding had a rough landing yesterday. He seemed to be all right when he disembarked, but, reportedly, he told his wife he wasn't feeling well before he went to bed, which seems reminiscent of the death of Natasha Richardson a little more than three months ago. An autopsy is scheduled for tomorrow.

Would my pastor speak about the mysterious ways of God? That, too, would have been appropriate. And, in a way, I guess that is what he spoke about. He reminded the congregation — which seemed smaller than usual but had to be considered hardy, given the 100°–plus temperatures we've had in Dallas lately — of John Lennon's words: "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

(Which reminds me. I must add that one to my favorite quotations on Facebook.

(Incidentally, I'm not sure when Lennon said that first — I don't even know if he was the first one to say it — but I know it was a line from the song "Beautiful Boy" that was on the last album Lennon released before he was murdered.)

My pastor calls these "holy interruptions." And I guess that is appropriate, when you realize that Jackson was preparing for 50 shows in England when he died.

Personally, I've been thinking a lot about the nature of fame after reading David Segal's musings on the subject in the New York Times.

Segal wrote that, while watching the TV coverage of the reactions to Jackson's death, "you had to wonder: When will this happen again? When will another pop culture figure mean so much to so many that people are moved to assemble, hug and dance?"

Segal seems inclined to believe that, because things have changed so dramatically since Jackson's record–smashing LP "Thriller" was released a quarter of a century ago, it might never happen again.

And his point is well taken. "People who buy music tend these days to buy — or steal it — online, a song at time," he writes. They don't seem to be buying albums, even though I suspect there are still some people (like myself) who prefer CDs — and I expect that segment of the marketplace to be around for awhile.

But, even if music consumers are acquiring their recordings online one at a time instead of investing in an entire CD's worth of material, that is, as he concedes, more a matter of "business and math" than it is a reflection on the fame and influence of the performer.

And, frankly, it doesn't seem all that different from the way things were when my brother and I were kids and we bought Jackson Five singles instead of LPs.

As I recall, we had quite a collection of those singles. But we collected them largely because we could afford them. In those days, we probably would have needed to save our allowances for four or five months to accumulate the money to pay for one album.

By comparison, a 45 rpm single only required about three or four weeks' allowance. You only got two songs (one on each side, except for those rare recordings that were one long song that started on the A side and concluded on the B side), and it was still a considerable exercise in discipline for a 7– or 8–year–old to save his allowance for a month. But it was simply unrealistic to think that a boy that age would resist the temptation to buy baseball or football cards or soft drinks or candy for five months just to buy a record, no matter how good the record was.

So today, as it was then, the focus is economic. But here's what has changed. Technological advancements have put more pressure on the artists and less on the consumers. When I was a child, the artists and the recording companies decided which songs would be released as singles. If a song you liked was not released as a single, the only way to get it was to buy the entire album. You couldn't download it — although you might be able to make a tape recording of a friend's copy if you had taping equipment. When I was collecting Jackson Five singles, most of the people I knew did not have taping equipment.

Today, consumers can buy the tracks they choose. They can download them from the internet and burn them onto homemade CDs in a matter of minutes. The choices are theirs. They are no longer at the mercy of the promoters and marketers representing recording companies.

There are a handful of (mostly deceased) performers whose bank accounts would unquestionably grow if recordings of any of their previously unreleased songs were discovered — even if those recordings turned out to be among the worst songs those performers ever recorded. If they were songs that Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley sang or the Beatles played but never released, their fans would line up days ahead of time to buy the CD without even hearing it.

For just about everyone else, though, the emphasis is on quality. Artists can't get away anymore with packaging CDs that have a couple of hot singles and a bunch of filler recordings to bulk them up.

But, to get back to Segal's premise, I think it's true that fame and success won't take the forms they did for Jackson and, no, we probably won't ever see another "Thriller." But that doesn't mean that someone of comparable stature won't come along.

The yardsticks for measuring fame are always changing. An album that spends months at the No. 1 spot on Billboard may not be possible anymore, but people often forget that seven of the nine songs on "Thriller" were released as singles — and all of them spent some time in the Top 10. I believe "Thriller" could still wield the kind of influence it did 25 years ago.

What we saw on our TV screens Thursday night was people reacting to the death of someone who connected with them as an artist. And people have always responded that way when someone who touched them dies. If that person dies at a young age, it is more painful — but it is still a sense of loss.

When Elvis died in 1977, I heard people wonder if we would ever again see the outpouring of grief that we saw then, but we did three years later, when John Lennon was killed. Again, I heard it said we would never see that kind of grief again, but we did, when Princess Di was killed.

Princess Di's public wake became the gold standard, I guess, although perhaps she doesn't belong in this group. She wasn't a recording artist, after all, but she did touch people's lives in a profound way. Anyway, the outpouring of grief over her death made people wonder if we would ever see that kind of global gloom for another deceased celebrity. And now, we have, following Michael Jackson's fatal cardiac arrest.

I think we'll see this kind of reaction when Paul McCartney dies (I'm not so sure about Ringo. That remains to be seen) and I think we might see this kind of reaction whenever Bruce Springsteen dies or whenever Bono dies. It's human nature. These men sang the songs that marked the milestones of many people's lives.

Those artists connected with their audiences. Sales are a tangible way of measuring someone's popularity, but they can't measure the intensity.

When McCartney dies, the public reaction may match or exceed Jackson's. (I have this image in my mind of folks at candlelight vigils singing "Yesterday," "Hey, Jude" and "Let It Be" in the hours after McCartney's death — while the talking heads on cable discuss his tumultuous marriage to Heather Mills.)

I'm not as sure of Springsteen or Bono, but I think they have the kinds of followings that will make it close.

I don't think Segal would buy that argument, mainly because those examples already have achieved a certain level of superstardom. Mostly, I think he writes about the up–and–coming artists. "[E]ven if nobody achieves album sales on a Jacksonian scale, couldn't he or she be an artist every bit as popular, every bit as loved, every bit as listened to?" Segal asks. "Probably not. The pop–idol field — like every field that can lead to super–fame — is more crowded than it has ever been, and the variety of routes to stardom keep growing."

I go along with that to a certain extent but not entirely. I think it relies too much on the bottom line, too much on commercial success to be an absolute. Jackson was an innovator as well as a performer. At a time when entertainment is evolving rapidly, being a good innovator is as important as being a good performer. Pioneers don't always enjoy the success their innovations bring to others, though. But some, like Jackson, enjoy a great deal of success.

There are a lot of things going on at the same time. And that reminds me of my very favorite line from "Forrest Gump" (I've heard these called "Gumpisms").

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"I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floating around accidental–like on a breeze, but I think maybe it's both. Maybe both is happening at the same time."

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Part of what is going on is the ongoing contribution recording artists make to events in our lives — through songs you heard when you were in love for the first time or when you got married or when you had your first child or when you graduated from college. Or when a parent or a sibling died.

I've heard it called "the soundtrack of our lives" — sales and airplay can influence that, but I know that there have been times in my life that I have associated with songs that most people never heard of.

Maybe that is the result of what my pastor would call a "holy interruption" — when one may, in seemingly random fashion, hear a song that forever summarizes that moment, that time in a life. The deaths of most of the artists who sang those songs may not inspire the kind of global grief we have seen with Elvis and Princess Di and Michael Jackson, but, for the ones whose songs are linked to critical times in my life, I know I will feel their loss, just as I am sure that others will. There won't be as many of us, but the intensity of the loss will be just as great.

Segal frets that "our infinite menu of options" means the end of "true superstardom" and opines that Jackson's death — and the deaths of McMahon and Fawcett — "reminds us of how little in pop culture we currently share."

I don't think that is true. If Segal grieves the loss of a culture in which we all share the same experience, maybe that is a good thing. The artists who speak to us don't speak to us on group levels. They reach us as individuals and for reasons that are as unique as their listeners.

They represent, as Gus McCrae said in "Lonesome Dove," "the sunny slopes of long ago."

The Relevance of Religion

When a voter is being asked to vote in a presidential primary, and one of the candidates doesn't have much experience and wants voters to assess his judgment as a yardstick for his potential, is it fair game to evaluate the organizations to which he has belonged (such as his church) and the people who have been in leadership roles in those organizations (such as his pastor)?

These are, after all, the organizations he has chosen to join and the people he has chosen to follow.

So I think the answer to that is yes -- to a certain extent.

Personally, I don't care where a candidate goes to church -- or if the candidate goes to church at all. I think that is the candidate's business, not mine.

I must admit, though, that I do like to know that a candidate for president is committed to something he/she believes in -- besides obtaining and holding on to power. But I don't want to be told that a candidate believes in something. I want to see evidence of it.

In matters of faith, it's easy for politicians to deceive the voters.

In the final two seasons of The West Wing, Alan Alda played a moderate Republican running for president. His character had been through a crisis of faith when his wife died, and he had not been to church since -- except for weddings and funerals.

Alda's character's church habits became an issue in the campaign, and he was finally forced to hold a press conference to defend his right not to attend church. In so doing, he spoke of how easy it is for a politician to lie about his faith. "It's the easiest lie they'll ever tell," he said. And he was right.

In this country, people like to talk about the separation of church and state, but as I've pointed out before, that has never really existed in the United States.

There is no state religion in this country, except to say that Christianity is the prevailing faith. That's just the way it is -- the same way that English is the primary language. It's not mandated by law. It's simply a fact. It has its roots in the settlers who came to the New World 400 years ago.

And, while Protestants and Catholics tend to live in harmony in this country, Catholics have only recently (in the last 50 years) been capable of receiving enough votes to win a national election.

And John F. Kennedy had to address the issue of his Catholicism head-on before being elected -- narrowly -- in 1960. No Catholic has been elected president since then -- unless you count Ronald Reagan, who had Catholic ancestry but wasn't a practicing Catholic.

Sometimes, the religion factor isn't what some voters would prefer. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had no formal affiliation with any church before he became president in 1953. He was baptized, confirmed, and became a communicant in the Presbyterian church less than two weeks after his first inauguration.

Some of our presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, had no religious affiliation. Does that mean they didn't believe in God? No. There seems to be some disagreement among scholars about Lincoln's faith in Christ, but he seems to have had a belief in God -- for most of his life, at least.

And religion continues to be a factor in national politics.

Jimmy Carter's "born again" religion was an issue -- for a time -- during the 1976 campaign.

Mitt Romney had to speak in defense of Mormonism a few months ago.

And today, Barack Obama is trying to deal with issues raised by his relationship with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

In my "heart of hearts," as the saying goes, I don't think that what a minister (who isn't running for the presidency) says has very much to do with what someone who is running for president will do if elected.

In this case, Obama has been running for president with only a few years experience in national politics and policymaking. So he has been asking voters to assess him on the quality of his judgment.

Based on that, I think it is just as fair to question his relationship with his pastor as it was for reporters to accept Gary Hart's challenge to them to catch him in the act of being unfaithful to his wife 20 years ago.

You could argue -- as some people did -- that Hart's infidelity had no bearing on the kind of president he would be. Just as some people argue today that what Rev. Wright says doesn't necessarily have any bearing on the kind of president Obama would be.

In Hart's case, his infidelity went to (pardon the pun) the heart of his campaign. Questions had been raised about his honesty, integrity, trustworthiness. When reporters caught him in an extramarital affair (after they had been dared to follow Hart), it confirmed a lot of suspicions voters had about him. It reflected poorly on the argument he made for being nominated for president.

Obama is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. His relationship with Rev. Wright reflects on the quality of his judgment, the same as his remark about "bitter" voters clinging to guns and religion (two of the sacred cows -- so to speak -- of American politics) and his appearance at William Ayers' home in Obama's 1995 campaign for the state senate did.

When one enters the race for the presidency, one enters the "big time." If one is not prepared to be scrutinized, one does not need to enter the presidential arena.

Obama could run for the Senate and encounter far less scrutiny three years ago. The scrutiny level was even lower when his campaigns were for a seat in the Illinois state legislature. The typical voter does not feel it is necessary to know everything there is to know about the candidates for the state senate -- or even the U.S. Senate.

But voters feel they need to know everything there is to know about those candidates who seek to be president.

Voters get to evaluate candidates by any means they wish. Candidates do not get to choose how they are evaluated, but they certainly should know that voters tend to use a candidate's political record and political statements in making their decision.

And voters may focus on seemingly irrelevant factors because they want to know as much as possible about a candidate, about how he/she thinks, about what he/she believes, before trusting him/her with the most important office in the land.

One of the things voters want to know is whether they can believe what a candidate says. When that candidate is trying to sell his/her judgment as the reason for being elected, a candidate's truthfulness is particularly important. And voters are going to use all sorts of methods to evaluate the candidate's truthfulness.

In this campaign, Kennedy's name has been mentioned frequently. Kennedy also had to sell the public on his judgment -- his opponent, as vice president under a popular president, had the advantage of semi-incumbency, even though his tenure in Washington was no longer than Kennedy's. And, when things backfired on Kennedy, as they did during the Bay of Pigs invasion, he had to be candid with the public.

He had to admit that his judgment had been faulty.

These days, it's the judgment of Obama that is being questioned. And, whatever mental image one has of Obama, the reality is that he is a politician. And he hasn't shown much hesitation to throw his inconvenient associates -- William Ayers, Tony Resko, Jeremiah Wright -- under the bus in order to further his political goals.

A lot of people are writing about Obama and Wright these days. The longer the questions linger, the longer attention will remain focused on this instead of the economy, gas prices, the war, health care, etc.

(By the way, if you'd rather be reading about something more relevant to the economic problems we face, may I suggest Thomas Friedman's column in the New York Times about our energy policy?)

In the meantime, we're getting a steady dose of writings about Obama and Rev. Wright. And we're going to continue to get that until all the questions are answered. When will that be? That depends on how candid Obama is -- or is perceived to be.

* Charlie Cook calls Rev. Wright "the Rev. Kamikaze" in the National Journal.

"Just days ago, it seemed that the only way that Barack Obama could fail to clinch his party's nod would be to leave his wife and move in with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright," writes Cook. "That is, until Wright took to the lectern at the National Press Club to launch what amounted to a kamikaze attack on Obama's candidacy, sputtering nonsense that must have left the senator's campaign operatives wondering whether they had accidentally tuned their TVs to the political horror channel."

* In the National Review, Byron York writes that the danger from this Wright affair isn't over for Obama. "The most damaging thing Rev. Jeremiah Wright said at the National Press Club on Monday had nothing to do with God damning America, or AIDS, or chickens coming home to roost," York says. "It had to do with whether Barack Obama is telling the American people the truth about himself."

* Peter Carnellos' piece in the Boston Globe carries the headline, "Candidate faces down his former pastor, but what took so long?"

Canellos raises a point that may be troubling many voters, even if they can't articulate it as well as he can.

"On Monday ... Wright took another shot: 'I said to Barack Obama last year, 'If you get elected, November the 5th, I'm coming after you, because you'll be representing a government whose policies grind under people,'" Canellos writes. "If Wright really had issued such a warning, Obama should have smelled trouble immediately. His failure to do so, and his decision to portray Wright as a distraction, inevitably raises the question of whether Obama is too naive to be president -- the very insinuation he ridicules on the campaign trail."

* Dick Morris writes in The Hill about "Obama's opportunity" to "define himself." He needs to seize that opportunity before others do.

* Richard Baehr writes, in American Thinker, about "Obama's Wright turn" at his Tuesday press conference -- in which Obama "condemned Wright and claimed that Wright had offended him."

* Mary Mitchell claims, in the Chicago Sun-Times, that "Obama opens a can of worms" and suggests, "This is a sad day for black America."

* In the Boston Globe, Scot Lehigh says, "What's really relevant here is not what Jeremiah Wright says but what Barack Obama believes. And in his remarks yesterday, Obama said unmistakably that Wright does not speak for him."

* Ralph Peters writes, in the New York Post, about "The Rev & The Global Victims' Club."

* Also in the New York Post, Michelle Malkin writes about the "Jive Talk Express." She casts doubts on Obama's judgment by raising a point that Republicans will be sure to bring up in the fall campaign.

"Who knew that the greatest threat to his presidential campaign would come from the preacher who married him, baptized him and prayed with him?" writes Malkin, a well-known conservative. "Obama should've known -- that's who. 'Yes, we can'? Try: Yes, you should have."

* John Nichols writes, in The Nation, that "[t]he problem is not Jeremiah Wright. The problem is a contemporary political culture that has come to rely on character assassination as an easy tool for reversing electoral misfortune -- and a media that willingly invites manipulation."

* Mark Brown writes, in the Chicago Sun-Times, that "it's gut check time for white Americans."

* In the New York Observer, Steve Kornacki writes about "Obama and the Benefit of the Doubt."

These are just the articles that have popped up in the last couple of days. There will be more articles written on this subject in the days and weeks ahead.

Obama has addressed this issue twice in the last six weeks. His original speech was hailed for its oratorical qualities, his press conference was hailed for other reasons.

But the questions persist.

It reminds me of something Dr. Samuel Johnson, the 18th century British author, said: "(The) manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."

Obama's Pastor

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright won't go away.

That's what's so wrong about Rev. Wright, as far as Barack Obama is concerned.

In America, everyone is free to believe what he/she wants to believe, and everyone is free to say (just about) anything he/she wants to say.

Our laws do draw the line at certain points. But it's our freedoms that allowed Jeremiah Wright to stand in the pulpit of his church and call upon God to "damn America."

Rev. Wright is entitled to his opinions, and he has expressed them frequently. But Obama, who apparently does not share Rev. Wright's views even though he spent many years as a member of Wright's congregation and listened to Wright's hate-filled messages Sunday after Sunday, is being weighed down by the minister's words.

"When I say I find these comments appalling, I mean it," Obama said. "It contradicts everything I am about and who I am."

What seems contradictory to me is the relationship between Obama's words and his actions. Is Obama saying he finds Wright's words "appalling" now that he wants to be president and needs the support of white blue-collar voters to make it happen -- but those same words were acceptable when Obama represented a mostly black state senate district in Illinois and heard Wright utter them as the pastor of his church?

Obama has no shortage of defenders for why he spent nearly two decades in Wright's church -- where he remains a member after Wright's retirement.

"Having been deserted at age 2 by his father," writes Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, "Obama has now been deserted by the father-figure in his church, the man who inspired him to become a Christian, married him, dedicated his house, baptized his children, gave him the title of his second book and theme for his presidential run and worked on his campaign."

Dowd is a diehard supporter of Obama's campaign, and that is something she is certainly entitled to be. But even the most devoted supporters can do only so much for a candidate. At some point, the candidate can no longer allow his surrogates to make his apologies for him.

Obama still needs to explain to a dubious public why he remained in the church for two decades and listened to Wright's assertions that the federal government manipulated AIDS to apply a "final solution" to blacks in America and that God permitted the September 11 attacks to happen because America had been practicing its own brand of terrorism abroad.

That's something Obama did not do at a news conference in Winston-Salem, N.C. And, try as she might, Dowd cannot apologize for Obama's lapse in judgment -- if one can call it that.

"Tuesday was more than a Sister Souljah moment," writes Dowd, "it was a painful form of political patricide. 'I did not vet my pastor before I decided to run for the presidency,' Obama said. In a campaign that’s all about who’s vetted, maybe he should have."

That seems a rather tame defense to me. Obama didn't need to investigate Wright. Obama was a witness. He sat in the pews of Wright's church for two decades and heard the minister's sermons himself. How much vetting did he need?

And how's this going to play with the blue-collar white voters?

(I assume they're the same voters Obama accused of clinging to their religion in times of crisis.)

Please Define 'Typical White Person'

I admit it. I was at work Tuesday. I didn't see Barack Obama's speech on race.

And I was at work Thursday, which apparently is when an interview with Obama was aired.

But I heard clips from both on the radio as I was driving home. And then I saw clips on TV at night.

I don't have the advantage of having seen or heard the speech or the interview in their entirety. And that may or may not affect my opinion of what was said or the context in which it was said.

But Obama, who apparently referred to his white grandmother in his speech and spoke about her suspicions of blacks, seems to have dismissed her reaction as that of a "typical white person."

A couple of questions here ...

First, what is a typical white person, anyway?

I grew up in the South. In my early years, segregation was stil the law of the land in the South. In my native Arkansas, I have vivid memories of going to the only movie theater in my hometown and seeing blacks being herded into one specific section of the balcony.

(I have a specific memory of going with my parents to see the classic film "How the West Was Won," which was completed in 1962 but didn't make it to my hometown theater for a couple of years -- things were different in those days and theaters in small towns weren't high on the list for distributors. And I recall seeing black patrons being crammed into a rather small section of the balcony. Although there were plenty of unoccupied seats elsewhere in the theater, the management brought in some folding chairs for blacks to sit in once that section of the balcony was filled. Either the law or social convention -- or both -- prevented the management from allowing any blacks to sit in the "white" section of the theater.)

And when I enrolled in school in the mid-1960s, public schools were integrated in my hometown for the very first time. So when my class graduated from high school in 1978, ours was the first class in my hometown's history to be integrated from first grade through high school.

The Democratic Party, which Obama now wants to represent as the presidential nominee, in Arkansas in 1966 was still filled with segregationists -- although not exclusively -- and Arkansas' Democrats had nominated a staunch segregationist for governor that year who just happened to live a few miles down the road from my home. I well remember the first day of school, when the media representatives of the day were on hand to photograph the gubernatorial candidate's twin sons being enrolled in an integrated elementary school.

My parents were Democrats, but they chose not to support their neighbor and fellow Democrat, mostly on the issue of segregation. And they joined with other like-minded Democrats in Arkansas who helped elect the state's first Republican governor since Reconstruction, Winthrop Rockefeller.

When Arkansas' Democrats got around to nominating a more moderate candidate for governor -- Dale Bumpers -- in 1970, my parents supported him.

Who were the typical white people in Arkansas in those days, Sen. Obama? Were they the segregationists, like our neighbor who unsuccessfully sought to be governor? Or were they my parents and those who thought as they did?

I'm sorry, but that phrase "typical white person" rubs me the wrong way. And I find it difficult to imagine a white politician using the phrase "typical black person" and not being chastised severely for it.

Or, considering who Obama's competition is for the Democratic nomination, can you imagine the reaction if Obama had used the phrase "typical white woman" in referring to his grandmother?

Daniel Nasaw and Ewen MacAskill write, in the Guardian, that other white voters are equally offended by what they've heard.

"The danger for Obama is not just that he could lose badly in Pennsylvania but that senior Democrats will wonder whether the loss of white votes could cost him the November general election," write Nasaw and MacAskill. "A theme that emerges from the bars and diners of white Philadelphia is suspicion that Obama's failure to disown (his pastor) and his presence in his church for almost two decades suggests that he himself is secretly resentful towards white people."

A black cook reportedly told the Guardian that Obama's pastor's comments reflect "the way we think, as a people. It may be a big thing to the white race, but you know, these things happened to us. All these things that he's talking about happened to us."

That brings me to my next point. Obama's skin color may be the same as many of the people who are voting for him, but his ancestors' experiences are not. Obama's black father was from Kenya, which is in eastern Africa. Most of the blacks in America were descended from west Africans.

It's simply a fact that, when slave traders came to Africa looking for slaves to take back to the new world in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, they didn't go on time-consuming -- and profit-consuming -- trips across the entire African continent looking for them. They took what was convenient to take, and that was Africans on the western side of the continent.

I'll admit, it's possible that there were isolated incidents of east Africans who were enslaved on the eastern side of the continent and wound up being sold on the western side later on. But that group would be a relatively small part of the overall slave population.

But even if the traders had habitually gone all the way across Africa to Kenya looking for slaves, Obama's ancestors were not among them. His father was born and raised in Kenya. To my knowledge, none of Obama's ancestors ever spent a day in captivity. Certainly his father didn't. He was educated at Harvard and returned to his native country, where he was a successful politician until his death in 1982.

So when a black cook in Philadelphia tells the Guardian that Obama's pastor was speaking of things that "happened to us," he's not speaking of things that happened to Obama's ancestors. Or, necessarily, to Obama himself.

One of my favorite films of all time is "Being There" starring Peter Sellers. Sellers plays a well-meaning but naive, childlike person who has lived his entire life in a private home and finds himself cast into an unfamiliar world when the "old man" who owns the home dies.

Sellers' character is so naive that he has no comprehension of what has happened when Louise, the black housekeeper, tells him the news. Yet he manages to stumble his way into the seat of power and becomes the focus of cultlike attention when those around him believe he tells them what they want to believe that he tells them. In the end, he is being considered for the presidential nomination -- even though, as a gardener, everything he says is about plants and seasonal growth cycles.

I've mentioned this film before because it represented to me the kind of cult that I believe has been forming around Obama for quite some time. But I've been thinking about something else in the film that seems particularly appropriate now.

At one point in the film, Louise is shown watching Sellers' character on TV. He's being interviewed on a Tonight Show type of program that has everyone, including the president, riveted to their TV sets, and Louise observes, to her companions, "It's for sure a white man's world in America. ... All you gotta be is white in America to get whatever you want."

Is that an example of "the way we think," as the cook from Philadelphia puts it? If it is, it doesn't show much understanding of the history of this country.

By that logic, every white person in America has his/her dreams fulfilled simply by virtue of race. But the reality is that nearly every white person I know has unfulfilled dreams -- whether those dreams are to be rich and successful or to have the ideal love relationship.

And what I've heard from Obama is unconvincing even in defense of his freedom of religion.

I can't claim to be a frequent churchgoer. I believe it is my right as an American to attend or not attend church, as I see fit, and I believe it is the right of every American to attend the church or synagogue or mosque or whatever of his or her choice.

In America, no one is or should be compelled to attend any house of worship he or she does not choose to attend.

Barack Obama has attended the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church for 20 years. And, from what I've read and heard in the last several days, there are numerous recordings of Rev. Wright's hateful, racist comments from many different days and months and years, enough to know that Obama's pastor's remarks were not isolated incidents. They happened all the time.

If one does not agree with the remarks one's pastor frequently makes, one has a few options if the person is a man of consicence. Initially, he may express his concerns directly to the pastor. Since Obama portrays himself as the agent of change, bringing about a change in racial attitudes in his pastor and his church would demonstrate profoundly what he is capable of. Did Obama make such efforts in his church? If he did, what was the result of his efforts?

I think it's reasonable for voters to ask that question. Everyone, including Obama, has acknowledged that he doesn't have much experience, and that's how voters tend to assess a candidate for president. In the absence of experience, Obama has sought to assure voters of his commitment to bringing about change.

Was there a change in his pastor or church? Well, I see no evidence of a change. True, the pastor is retired now. But the church publishes a magazine that honors recipients who are deemed worthy with awards. Such an award -- which bears the pastor's name -- was given to Louis Farrakhan. Obama has never disavowed the magazine or the award -- or Farrakhan.

If a congregant is unsuccessful at bringing a change in the church, he may choose not to attend that pastor's services anymore. If he is truly a man of faith, he will seek out a house of worship in which he is more comfortable.

If he agrees with what his pastor says or if he has no conscience, he will stay where he is. Obama stayed where he was.

The recordings of Rev. Wright's rantings against America play against the American need for a president who at least seems patriotic.

"It is already easy to imagine the Republican attack ads against Barack Obama," writes Sheldon Alberts for National Post.

The scenario isn't too hard to picture in one's mind. It's as if the ad has already been put together and is just waiting for the right time to be aired:

"They open with video of his wife, Michelle, saying she was proud of America 'for the first time in my adult lifetime' because of her husband's presidential candidacy. Cut to the Illinois senator explaining that he doesn't wear an American flag lapel pin because it is a 'substitute for true patriotism.' Then flash a clip of Obama explaining that his Caucasian grandmother was a 'typical white person' because she uttered racial epithets and was afraid of black people.

"Finally, the coup de grace, pictures of Obama's angry, arm-waving preacher blaming the United States for 9/11 and shouting 'God Damn America' to the rafters of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. Game, set, election, John McCain."

I've heard a lot of people in the media in recent days applauding Obama for speaking courageously about the race issue. I don't think he spoke so much from courage as from political necessity. As the first black who has a realistic chance of winning a major party's nomination for president in a nation that once legally condoned slavery, it was inevitable that race would need to be addressed.

But confronting racism requires more from Obama -- who is, after all, as much white as he is black -- than stereotyping his grandmother as a "typical white person" while applying no such racial label to anyone -- his pastor, for example -- who is black.

If Obama is going to be a true spark for change, and if he wants some of that change to come in the area of race relations, he cannot frame discussions in an "us vs. them" way -- even if that is more implied than overtly expressed. His words this week did not suggest unity to many white listeners.

Because (as he surely must be aware by now), if Obama becomes the first president with dark skin, as much attention will be paid to what his words may or may not be suggesting as will be paid to the words themselves.

Whatever their traditional definitions may be.