True Believers of Obama Nation will surely accept Barack Obama’s denunciation of his former minister, spiritual mentor and surrogate father Jeremiah Wright and move on down the road to hope and change with nary a further thought.

The mainstream media are already doing backflips over the painful courage of Obama’s words, while at the same time whispering that he might should have uttered them a bit earlier (although, thinking solely in the tactical political terms that so occupy them, few reach back further than two or three weeks).

The American people, always hopelessly defying those who would influence them, are not quite sure what to believe, with almost a third telling pollsters that the Obama/Wright relationship is a major concern. The first consequential test of how voters act on those concerns will come next Tuesday, when Democratic Party primaries are held in North Carolina and Indiana.

Whatever the ultimate outcome, it is fairly clear to most reflective beings, regardless of race, religion, party affiliation or ideology, that Wright’s extremist views on a variety of subjects did not just pop up in the past few months, and it is next to impossible to believe that Obama was as unaware of them as he claims, a severe blow to his credibility.

It is also clear to any who have watched Pastor Wright’s National Press Club performance that in context or out of context, in snippets or in loops, in whole or in part, his views of his country are bizarre and offensive.

Those, however, are the obvious issues being widely discussed at water coolers and in war rooms. But they point to the much larger issue of who Barack Obama is as opposed to who he says he is, to what he can do as opposed to what he says he will do.

Here’s Obama from his April 29 press conference: “I have spent my entire adult life trying to bridge the gap between different kinds of people. That’s in my DNA, trying to promote mutual understanding to insist that we all share common hopes and common dreams as Americans and as human beings. That’s who I am. That’s what I believe. That’s what this campaign is all about.”

But go back to the beginning of Obama’s presidential campaign, as reported by The New York Times on May 1: “Then came Mr. Obama’s announcement in early 2007 that he would be running for president. Mr. Obama had invited Mr. Wright to deliver the invocation at the event in Springfield. But the evening before, Mr. Wright answered his cellphone and heard an apologetic, soon-to-be candidate. It turned out that a magazine just had released some controversial quotes that, it claimed, were delivered by Mr. Wright.

“‘You can get kind of rough in the sermons,’ Mr. Wright said Mr. Obama told him. ‘Rather than have you out front, we thought it would be best to not have you do the invocation.’”

Typically, The New York Times has much more detail, but in its conclusion states, “The cascade of sleights and misunderstandings between spiritual mentor and protégé has halted for now.”

The relationship between pastor and would-be president is now shattered, and if Wright chooses to publicly challenge Obama’s credibility further, it could end his candidacy, although probably not before the general election.

The ultimate questions that the disintegration of the Wright/Obama relationship poses is that if Barack Obama cannot, in private, with all his communication skills, “bridge the gap” with his minister and mentor of twenty years, how can he “bridge the gap” in his own divided nation? How can he “bridge the gap” with America’s enemies, with whom he wants to unconditionally talk?

In relationships foreign and domestic, there is no room for a “cascade of sleights and misunderstandings.”