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Matt Yglesias thinks Obama probably got involved in Wright's church because he needed local credibility. He wanted to run for office, his skin was dark but he had no black "experience" - i.e. the normal American history for a black person (remember, he grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia; his father was African, not American; and he was raised by a white mother) - so to signal the locals that he was one of them he joined one of their institutions. In other words, going to that church was political opportunism when it started, and he probably had to keep up his local appearance afterwards.
To my ears that sounds about right, because nothing I have heard about Obama personally indicates he actually believes the sort of crap that Wright has been spewing. Of course this does present a problem for Obama. As others have pointed out, this puts him in a bind - if Yglesias is right about why he went to that church, and I suspect he probably is. But it does come back to what I have talked about before, which is that people are trying to make Obama into something he isn't - he's a very talented, very charismatic, very smart politician - but he's a politician, and a pretty conventional urban Democrat at that (albeit more charismatic and clever than most). He's not the messiah. You may or may not like urban Democrats, and that's OK. But take him for who he is, and don't persuade yourself otherwise. People who invest their hopes and dreams in him are gong to be very disappointed when he turns out to have to get down in the dirt with other politicians to get anything done.
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