Obama is the new tragic mulatto. While he can relate to whites, blacks demand he puts them first. He must constantly prove his loyalty to the black race, and today that loyalty is rooted in politics, a Marxist view of racial relations, hostility to whites and their welath, resentment at black underperformance in the economy and in life, and other traditional areas of criticism. Of course, if Obama did this openly, whites who have embraced his racial healer rhetoric would reject him. They want a political Sidney Poirtier who exemplifies the best in American and black society, not a hateful Al Sharpton figure. If it turns out his vagueness is just a charade to conceal the underlying hate-driven, Marxist, black nationalist reality, his support will evaporate because, even in their current state of degradation and self-hatred, even whites will not endorse their own destruction knowingly.

Nobody is terribly concerned about Rev. Dr. Wright’s theology, but they are concerned about his politics, which makes up a big part of his act, and which was important in bringing Obama to his church in the 1980s when Obama was church-shopping because he had been advised that his political career required him to belong to a church.

If Obama had been running as a leftist, Wright wouldn’t be important, but Obama has been running as a non-partisan uniter and the press has been playing along. Many Americans are getting their first unfiltered glimpse of where Obama is coming from, and they are shocked by what they see.

I do think that part of what’s going on here is that you’ve simply been following all of this much more closely, and for a longer time, than most Americans have been. I had read Dreher’s prediction that Rev. Wright would be Obama’s undoing, but didn’t encounter much of anyone else talking about it and so didn’t think much of it at the time. And so to see those videos, and learn about all of this in so much more detail did come as something of a shock to me – and I imagine the same goes in spades for those who are even less politically informed.

As to the differences between the ways Obama and Romney have been treated, I do think it’s worth nothing that there’s nothing that seems to be especially politically dangerous about Romney’s theological views. And so while I, for one, don’t see anything wrong with voters who wish to use religious orthodoxy as a litmus test but myself was entirely untroubled by Romney’s Mormonism, there is something importantly different in the present situation: namely, that understanding the world in the way Rev. Wright apparently does can lead quite quickly to some highly objectionable views on matters of policy. (There are, of course, plenty of matters of policy on which Romney’s positions made him utterly unpalatable as well; again, though, the key point is just that they had nothing to do with his Mormonism.) And so while I don’t in fact think that Senator Obama shares his pastor’s views on such things as, for instance, the origin of AIDS or the crack epidemic, if I did think that he shared them, I would be massively disinclined to vote in his favor, and would probably be willing to swallow hard and vote for whomever his viable opponent happened to be, even if it were McCain, Romney, or … well, perhaps not Giuliani.

This, then, is why, given the content of Rev. Wright’s sermons, it seems entirely reasonable that Obama’s religious convictions should be coming under more scrutiny than Romney’s were: while most people don’t think of Mormonism itself as entailing any especially problematic political commitments, the same clearly cannot be said for Rev. Wright’s “theology”. It is of course true that there are other ways in which Romney’s flawed policies got a “free pass” from the kinds of people who are now jumping all over Obama – but this seems to be a distinct phenomenon from their willingness to overlook Romney’s heterodoxy on matters divine.