Obama's challenge

Politics: A historic speech has not silenced all critics or lifted all polls | Jamie Dean, Marvin Olasky

Alex Brandon/AP

Some Americans say Barack Obama is the most inspiring political leader in at least 40 years. Others say he is a great deceiver. Machiavellians say the words leader and deceiver go together, so he is both.

The second half of March tested Obama's ability to deal with his first major public-relations crisis, the offensive sermonizing of Jeremiah Wright, his pastor for 20 years. Wright, retiring this summer after 36 years as senior minister of the 6,000-member Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, became an issue when taped sermon excerpts showed Wright from the pulpit asking God to damn America, which he called the "U.S. of KKK-A." Among Wright's vicious charges: The U.S. government invented the HIV virus to wipe out black people.