And when I say “we,” I think I speak for more than just the liberal Democrats who’ve favored Obama in his bid for the presidency. I think I speak also for vast segments of independent and Republican voters who saw in Obama a reassuring, even self-flattering transcendence of race.

We wanted his success at the polls to put the politics of bigotry and of grievance in their respective places. We wanted him to show that the majority of Americans have moved beyond fear, mistrust, polarization and resentment and can, at last, in the hopeful words of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., judge people not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character.

We didn’t want Barack Obama to start a national conversation about race. We wanted him to end it.

And, sure, ours was a naïve desire.

Not only is race too complex an issue to be settled by the rise of one candidate, but Obama himself is too complex a man to float serenely above it. Years ago, he wrote an autobiography that wrestled with his identity and anger, and it should come as no surprise that his bond with the occasionally incendiary retiring pastor of his Afrocentric Chicago church defies easy understanding.

I’m not sure I understand it myself.

Over the past week, I’ve had numerous conversations with friends and readers of all persuasions who are wondering—some in sorrow, some with triumphant scorn—why Obama didn’t act years ago to defuse the obvious political time bomb contained in the rhetoric of Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Even those who, like me, are inclined to draw a sharp distinction between what Obama believes and what his longtime pastor believes, still shake their heads wondering why he didn’t begin creating distance from Wright back in 2003 when he began running for the U.S. Senate.

Yes, the two were like family in some ways, and Wright, his scorching excesses in the pulpit notwithstanding, is a brilliant man whose church has done considerable good on the South Side. But still .....

You don’t have to be a knuckle-dragging racist to doubt Obama’s judgment here and to wonder why voters should believe he can elevate the tone in America when he apparently couldn’t even do so in his own house of worship.

I don’t mean to argue the point either way today, only to say that I don’t yet see how Obama’s presidential aspirations can survive what some are calling the “Pastor Disaster.”

Some polls suggest that his searching, subtle and challenging speech in Philadelphia last week put the issue behind him and that voters have moved on.

I don’t buy it. Obama’s transformation from the candidate who puts race behind us into the candidate who puts race front and center is no one-week dust-up or overblown campaign spat.

It’s a shift that, along with the unavoidable video clips of Wright at his most discomfiting, seems destined to erode Obama’s support among independents and white working-class Democrats—voters he’ll need, assuming he holds on to his primary lead and faces John McCain in November.

There’s no way around this problem for Obama. He couldn’t renounce or minimize his 20 years in those pews even if he wanted to.

His only way is straight through it, guided by the most audacious hope he’s ever had—that talk will lead to understanding and healing.

If we must have a national conversation about race, then I, for one, want Barack Obama to lead it.

-----

NOTE: