Free Republic

The scrutiny of Sen. Barack Obama's relationship to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the recently retired pastor of Obama's Chicago church, highlights the complex intersections of religion and race in the United States. Neither Wright's purportedly inflammatory statements nor the pressure on Obama to repudiate them are anything new. The tangled webs of religion and race are two of the most persistent themes in American history.

Sometimes, like a Cinderella team marching through March, Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign seems nothing short of charmed. It helps that while Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has 10 weeks to make Obama totally and entirely unelectable, Obama just has to wait out the clock. But the outside help Obama is getting (some that he asked for, some that he didn't) is the X-factor -- and it means that, even as Obama grapples with perhaps the biggest challenge to his candidacy, he will be the nominee short of something else dramatic happening in the race that's already seen everything. To survey...

'You kids!" my mother ritually despaired in my childhood. "You're so - negative!" That line has been a standing joke between my brothers and me for decades, ruefully repeated at my mother's expense. But she had a point. We were a critical bunch. On into my middle age, much of my non-fiction commentary has continued to deplore this, to ridicule that. I am still "negative". Yet, like many of my American compatriots this week, I have been enjoying the unnerving experience of being for something. Of being encouraged. Of daring to believe that something in my country has improved. Of...

Call him Barack O'Bama - for he's got the luck of the Irish. The very week he faces his toughest obstacle ever - one that may still derail his candidacy - Obama gets a near-game-ending pot of gold. It now appears certain that Hillary Rodham Clinton's efforts to rewrite party rules in a desperate search for a lifeline have failed. Her absurd proposal of counting her "wins" in Michigan and Florida - long after everyone agreed they wouldn't count - has been laughed off the table. And now, it appears, there won't even be any revotes. While revotes are the...