Barack Obama defines his role:

Obama described Wright as a “brilliant man who was still stuck in a time warp.” “View” co-host Elisabeth Hasslebeck expressed concern that Obama’s choice of pastor may show a lack of judgment. The candidate explained, “Part of what my role in my politics is to get people who don’t normally listen to each other to talk to each other, who [say] crazy things, who are offended by each other, for me to understand them and to maybe help them understand each other.”

This shtick isn’t helping. The headline on this story is “Obama: America Doesn’t Get Rev. Wright.” Really? More talk like that, and the issue will be whether it’s Obama who doesn’t get America. “People who don’t normally listen” to Jeremiah Wright (and certainly not for 20 years) get him and his racist “liberation theology” very quickly. They have no desire to be brought together to “understand” him, and they won’t take kindly to a presidential candidate whose way of wiggling off the hook of his own poor choices is to suggest they’re just as crazy as his loon of a pastor.

UPDATE: I would wager that, privately or otherwise, a significant sliver of the electorate agrees with this:

It strikes me that Barack Obama is uniquely unfit to be President.