I understood what Rev. Wright was saying in his all-be-it overwrought way about America. But who was the Barack Obama he was talking about? Didn't recognize him.

Then it hit me: The media is focused on how Obama views Wright. The answer may be in how Wright views Obama. The answer is he makes him up. He makes him up to fit his cosmology of bitterness, well-earned as it may be.

The starting point, I'll confess, is that I believed what I read in "Dreams From My Father," one of the most subtle, textured explorations of class, race and culture ever written. The story's arc is basically how the child-Barack takes in a world of influences that includes an extraordinary white mother, an absent African father, an Indonesian step father and life abroad, custodial white grandparents. He lived in struggling middle-class circumstances, attended an exclusive prep school.

Slowly, he begins to feel the pull of race in the U.S. Since he doesn't quite belong anywhere, he can choose. He chooses to integrate himself into African-American life.  He articulates it; it's a choice. As much a true citizen of the world as anyone ever was, he comes to know he needs a place, a community, an identity.

The book ends at his wedding with a tableau of his African half-brother -- a Muslim convert whose strident attitudes Barack finds objectionable -- hugging his white mother and grandmother, saying his has two more mothers now. Obama calls it the happiest moment of his life. He has solved his issues with community and grafted the solution on to his broader, even more important vision of humanity.

So who is this cartoon character, this ghetto archtype, Wright thinks is running for president? He's the child of a single mother who grew up in poverty surviving and triumphing over the sting of racism, a man with every right and reason to be as angry as the pastor himself.

I can only imagine that the Harvard law and Colombia U. grad, the Sidley & Austin summer associate, U. Chicago law professor, the prep school kid, the child of an adored white mother must have found all this pretty amusing. Like alot of Wright's other rants.