This from Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal:



We can't find a single issue on which Obama has broken with his party's left-wing interest groups. Early on he gave a bow to merit pay for teachers, but that quickly sank beneath the waves of new money he wants to spend on the same broken public schools. He takes the Teamsters line against free trade, to the point of unilaterally rewriting NAFTA. He wants to raise taxes even above the levels of the Clinton era, including a huge increase in the payroll tax. Perhaps now Obama will tack to the center, but somehow he will have to explain why the "change" he's proposing isn't merely more of the same, circa 1965.

There is also the matter of judgment, and the roots of his political character. We were among those inclined at first to downplay his association with the Trinity United Church. But Obama's handling of the episode has raised doubts about his candor and convictions. He has by stages moved from denying that his 20-year attendance was an issue at all, to denying he'd heard Rev. Jeremiah Wright's incendiary remarks, to criticizing certain of those remarks while praising Rev. Wright himself, to repudiating the words and the reverend, and finally to leaving the church.

Most disingenuously, he said recently that the entire issue caught him by surprise. Yet he was aware enough of the political risk that he kept Rev. Wright off the stage during his announcement speech more than a year ago.

A 2004 Chicago Sun-Times interview with Obama mentioned three men as his religious guides. One was Rev. Wright. Another was Father Michael Pfleger, the Louis Farrakhan ally whose recent remarks caused Obama to resign from Trinity, but for whose Chicago church Obama channeled at least $225,000 in grants as a state senator. Until recently, the priest was connected to the campaign, which flew him to Iowa to host an interfaith forum. Father Pfleger's testimony for the candidate has since been scrubbed from Obama's campaign Web site. A third mentor was Illinois state Sen. James Meeks, another Chicago pastor who has generated controversy for mixing pulpit and politics.

The point is not that Obama now shares the radical views of these men. The concern is that by the senator's own admission they have been major moral influences, and their views are starkly at odds with the candidate's vision as a transracial peacemaker. Their patronage was also useful as Obama was making his way in Chicago politics. But only now, in the glare of a national campaign, is he distancing himself from them. The question is what in fact Obama does believe.