What better sign do we have that Obama Central is running scared in the wake of Rev. Jeremiah’s sermons than this plaintive plea by Sun-Times columnist and O. enthusiast Mary Mitchell:

We get it. A lot of white people were offended by snippets of sermons by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.  [She doesn’t get it.]

But frankly, critics and those who are supporting a candidate other than Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination have gotten all of the mileage they can out of this debate.  [No.]

All right, fellas, you had your fun.  However:

The aftermath of this racially polarizing incident is predictable. Instead of rising to the challenge to move away from the racial rhetoric that Obama talked about in his historic speech, we the media will continue to fan its flames.

Next, you’ll be bombarded with polling data that purport to show that Obama is losing ground with the white vote.  [Purport all you want, you creeps.]

But wait.  The holy man’s words are plastered over Internet and YouTube, his flock stands and waves approval, he’s the most famous preacher in the America, and it’s racially polarizing.  Would Mary M. rather he be a little secret?

Nope.  How can any of his people object when his light is taken out from under the bushel of 400 W. 95^th Street? 

Look.  Candidate O., a person of interest in the matter, gives a speech that NYT’s David Brooks calls “the perfect statement of dignity” and “a glimmer of hope” in a world otherwise gone terribly wrong. “You just can’t buy that kind of analysis,” said A Waco Farmer, one of the Bosque Boys.

But all Mary M. can do is sigh:

At this point, Obama has done all he can do to put this matter to rest.

He has condemned Wright’s controversial sermons as “wrong” and “divisive,” even though he knows as well as I do that after 9/11, you could have walked into several activist churches in Chicago and heard a similar sermon delivered from the pulpit.  [How many?]

And he has given many black people reason to pause by distancing himself from a man he once introduced to the world as his spiritual leader.

She defends Wright as a man unjustly criticized, in view of his non-preaching achievements, blaming us who have not praised them, herself included.

She pictures him as shattered by the publicity:

I have not spoken to Wright, who will retire in June as the church’s senior pastor, but I imagine his heart is broken.

She should talk to him.  If Jeremiah Wright’s heart is broken by this outpouring of attention for him and his preaching and his black liberation theology, I am a proud graduate of Moody Bible Institute. 

It’s to die for, what’s happened to him.  He’s living a preacher’s dream.