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.

AP veteran Ron Fournier has coined a potentially harmful look-out, watch-out description of Obama: He thinks he’s hot stuff.

[T]here’s a line smart politicians don’t cross — somewhere between “I’m qualified to be president” and “I’m born to be president.” Wherever it lies, Barack Obama better watch his step.

He’s bordering on arrogance

The man from audacity “can be a bit too cocky for his own good,” says Fournier. 

“To know me is to love me,” Obama said in July.  “Every place is Barack Obama country once Barack Obama’s been there,” he said later.

True, there’s a certain amount of tongue-in-cheekiness to such remarks — almost as if Obama doesn’t want to take his adoring crowds and political ascent too seriously. He was surely kidding when he told supporters in January that by the time he was done speaking “a light will shine down from somewhere.”

“It will light upon you,” he continued. “You will experience an epiphany. And you will say to yourself, I have to vote for Barack. I have to do it.”

Kidding on the square, as my father used to say?

O. and his wife “ooze a sense of entitlement.”  She recently laid it on heavily, calling him “one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics” — we should be very grateful — and we will get only one chance to elect him.

With the entitlement will come his feeling very hurt if we don’t elect him, with accompanying emotions from his supporters, especially those who seethe with their feelings of victimhood — the other side of the volatile entitlement equation.

Update: A former reporter for the Hyde Park Herald recalls O. from his state senate days, when he was prone to a hot response and willing to bully a newsman:

It’s not quite eight in the morning and Barack Obama is on the phone screaming at me. He liked the story I wrote about him a couple weeks ago, but not this garbage.

Months earlier, a reporter friend told me she overheard Obama call me an asshole at a political fund-raiser. Now here he is blasting me from hundreds of miles away for a story that just went online but hasn’t yet hit local newsstands.

It’s the first time I ever heard him yell, and I’m trembling as I set down the phone. I sit frozen at my desk for several minutes, stunned.

Yet more interesting, in those days he was Emil Jones’s man.  Jones, senate president, became his “kingmaker,” writes Todd Spivak in the Houston (TX) Press:

“Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator,” Jones told former alderman, now talk-show host Cliff Kelley, an old friend.  “Oh, you are? Who might that be?” asked Kelley in a conversation both confirmed for Spivak.  “Barack Obama.”

Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.

O’s earmark requests were to include “tens of millions for Jones’s Senate district.” 

Back to O. as intimidating:

I was 25 and had no problem interviewing big-wig politicians. But I always had to steel my nerves when calling Obama. His intelligence was intimidating, and my hands inevitably shook with sweat.

Barack, we hardly know ye.

On Today Show today on NBC, Melinda Henneberger, once-NYT reporter, now Slate contributor, says Obama is helped by the preacher-friend controversy because it puts to rest the idea that he’s a Muslim.  He “answered an altar call 20 years ago.”

On same show, Michael Dyson, the itinerant Afro-studies prof once at DePaul U., refers to “so-called inflammatory rhetoric” of the preacher friend and backs him up in his analysis of American history AND is a fervent Obama supporter.

Meanwhile, are we to believe no white people are going to rethink their Obama commitment when he merely rejects certain sayings of this preacher but not the preacher himself, for whom the sayings reflect his fervent beliefs — unless we think these spiels were aberrations for him, which no one is saying.

Obama likes the guy, is obviously quite comfortable with him as an individual, even has a warm relationship, even as the guy is a race-baiter of the first water.  Four years coming up of the smooth-talking left-wing president whose friends we have to ignore?  God bless and save America.

No other churches for Obama to pick?

At some point, in some venue, Mr. Obama is going to have to give a speech directly addressing his longtime pastor’s views and answering a simple question: Why didn’t he find another church that didn’t include a leader who so frequently engaged in such hate speech?

That’s John Fund in WSJ.com’s Political Diary, voicing my very thought in the matter.  It’s been 30 years (this month, in fact) since I regularly attended church on assignment.  But I must say that there have to be other South Side churches and preachers — black, white, and indifferent — that don’t demagogue the Gospel.

But O. found something he was looking for in this church that he could find in no other, we assume, and now he’s stuck with this wild-man preacher.

Look, even Catholics can pick and choose among Catholic churches.  As a Protestant, O. is part of a tradition where picking and choosing got its biggest boost religion-wise.

He did not know about the man’s oratorical proclivities, he says.  He wasn’t there when he said this or that.  But how many sermons did O. have to miss not to catch the drift of this man, who is not a crazy uncle he inherited but a spiritual father whom he chose?

He was surprised to hear the man talks this way, as “so contrary to my own life and beliefs.”  If only he had known.

And where did those worshipers come from pictured in the video cheering the pastor on?  Did they pop in knowing he would uncork something big and exciting that day?  Were they surprised when he talked that way?