A mighty leap.(POLITICS)

SAM PATCH was an early-American daredevil who drew huge crowds to watch him jump into river gorges at waterfalls. Barack Obama is attempting the highest leap of his career in his efforts to explain his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Wright, who recently stepped down from his pulpit at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, has been a central figure in Obama's life for two decades. Wright converted him, married him, and baptized his children; one of Wright's sermons supplied the title of Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope. But other Wright sermons, which have been circling the rim of the media, have now gone mainstream.

Wright has exhorted his congregation to say, not "God bless America," but "God damn America." He has called the USA the "US of KKK A." After 9/11, he said our chickens had come home to roost--those being the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and our policies toward Palestinians and South Africa. For good measure, he said that Bill Clinton had done to black people what he did to Monica Lewinsky.

These spoiled-chicken McNuggets are the products of black liberation theology, which goes beyond the American black church's traditional identification of its travails with the sufferings of Israel in the Old Testament. Wright's models--Dwight Hopkins of the University of Chicago Divinity School and James Cone of New York's Union Theological Seminary--preach that Jesus was a black man, and that God's love will lead to black power and what Cone calls "destruction of the white enemy." Black liberation theology, a la Wright, is rather like Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, minus the science-fiction paraphernalia of Dr. Yacub and spaceships.

At first Obama responded to the controversy lamely. He ...