Before Barack Obama took to the podium yesterday, I was pretty angry at how slimy the presidential campaign had become. And my plan was to write a screed about those whites who want Obama to "transcend race" while they get to hold on to their racist ways. In the latest episode, inflammatory snippets of sermons by Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, had been fashioned into a political bombshell by Obama's opponents. Right-wing TV commentators then detonated it with ignorant vitriol, including an insinuation by Pat Buchanan that Wright was...