Before criticizing Barack Obama's response to Jeremiah Wright's hate speech, I am want to make clear that I am one of Obama's most fervent supporters, and will remain so.  I love this guy.  Went to school with him.  Met his wife back in the day.  Maxed out my contributions.  Believe passionately that he is the one right choice for our party and country.

When his campaign is on message, it has soared.  When it has parried, it has often done well, as in the South Carolina debate.  Sometimes it has made rookie mistakes on small things ("just words" without attribution), but nothing that makes you fear he'd run a weak or dithering campaign against McCain.  The Davids, Plouffe and Axelrod, are relentless, smooth, on message, and running a far more impressive campaign than the meandering pastiche of Penn-Wolfson that lurches from tactic to inconsistent tactic.

But Jeremiah Wright's comments about September 11 and damning the United States present a moment both of tactical and moral clarity.  Prone to brushing off flaps, prone to keeping positive, reluctant to push aside someone who has helped him, Obama needs to adapt, and preempt the harm these words will otherwise do to his candidacy.  Wright has been a mentor, who Obama credits with the title of his book, the Audacity of Hope.  Precisely because Wright's words are the antithesis of hope, Obama needs to Souljah his mentor, or at least his mentor's words.

First, Wright sermonized five days after September 11:  "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye." 

Whether or not he is making a causal argument -- that 9/11 occurred because of prior bad acts -- Wright makes crystal clear that we deserved 9/11:  "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."
 
Second, in much the same voice, Wright damned America:

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

Where to start?

Putting aside the word game of whether one can commit genocide against a nation, 9/11 was an act of genocide, morally akin to the extermination of any national or ethnic group.  No one deserves genocide.  And American voters will, when they hear these words in 527 ads and on talk radio, make up their minds about them.  And they will agree that the suggestion that we had 9/11 coming is not only beyond the pale, it is not "just words" -- they will want a President who is as disgusted by it as they are. 

The "God damn America" thing is more of the same, and just as disgusting to enough Americans to cost you an election.  The White House is the people's house, goes the cliche.  And Americans do not want someone who sermonizes that they are "damned" as an invited guest in their house at any time. 

The "crazy uncle" defense, which was Obama's first response to these vituperations, does not impress.  One does not say that one merely "disagrees" with Nazism.  How can one merely "disagree" that the innocents jumping off the Twin Towers didn't have it coming?  These are hateful words, but not from a distant wingnut like Farrakhan.  Obama is not accountable for Wright's words, but tell that to the casual voter.  Obama's sometime closeness to Wright makes it important to draw a hard line between Obama and the words.  If he does not draw that line, the words will stick for some.  And because the country needs Obama, we need that not to happen.  We need Obama to stop it from happening.  That simple.

And is it wrong for Americans who want a truer patriotism, a more thinking patriotism, to also want community?  Community with antiracist independents and Republicans tired of partisan bile, of unnecessary division?  Of course not, this is the core message of our Obama movement.  And what of that community?  Just as mindless flag-worship (you can't desecrate a flag -- it's not literally sacred) is unAmerican to our progressive values, so is gratuitous America-bashing foreign to the governing majority -- the governing community of left and right -- Obama can build.

Now is the time to speak to those divergent places of which Obama speaks on the stump:  farmers in the snows of Iowa, the high deserts of Nevada, small towns in South Carolina, the barrio in L.A.  They didn't deserve 9/11, and they aren't damned in any theology a responsible leader will not denounce.

In whatever way you must, Barack, and not a pro forma "reject and denounce," please find the right words to put the crazy uncle on a shelf.  Like the litany in the "just words" speech, these words matter a hell of a lot.  Show you're the President who can win that broad majority. 

Those words have no place in your heart, in America's heart, in the White House, in your White House.  We know it.  Now you tell it.