I was just thinking about this key passage from the NYT article linked to in the current top entry at TPM:

No less important, the campaign hopes that Mr. Obama will have been battered by five rough weeks that raise questions about his past, including the pastor’s incendiary comments, that would underscore Mrs. Clinton’s warning to Democrats that they were rallying around someone who was untested and unvetted.

And I'm wondering: Could the Rev. Wright business actually help Barack Obama secure the Democratic nomination?

Obama was relatively lucky with the timing of the whole thing. Had it happened just prior to the Texas and Ohio primaries, for example, he may have suffered a significant delegate blow and not emerged nearly as competitively as he has.

Instead, this “scandal” has broken during the long doldrums prior to the Pennsylvania primary. And the thing is, he's not even supposed to win that one anyways. Most polls have consistently had him down by 10-15 points, and the only expectations of the outcome for Obama have been low ones. So in order to meet those expectations, he really doesn't have to do that well.

And now, his campaign has ample time to handle the Wright issue, and his first attempt at doing so – the big race speech – was viewed by most as a meaningful, and probably at least partially effective step in the right direction. So it seems to me that by the time Pennsylvania Democrats go to the polls, his chances for getting his campaign back on a better course, and possibly even making up much of the ground that was lost in this incident, are pretty good.

So if he gets through this mess that most pundits have described as extremely damaging to his campaign and emerges from Pennsylvania with results that basically match the previously expected numbers, then he will be on very solid ground in claiming that he actually has been vetted. That he got some truly heavy artillery blasted directly at him, and yet his outcome in the primary was not that greatly affected, and voters seem not to have clung to a view of the Wright matter as a strike against him.

And then, in spite of all this hype, Obama might actually be able to turn this situation around and use it as proof to the super delegates that he is tested, he is vetted, and he does in fact have the resiliency to weather the general election.