"Not so compromising. If you don't vote for the Democratic nominee in this election, whichever one it be, then you might as well vote libertarian for all the substantive change you will make."

You'd have to elaborate. Don't presume I haven't spent years deliberating on the significance of my political choices, my whole life, in fact. How compromising I am is relative, so there's not so much to say on this front. As I say, we're clearly coming from two very different world views.

"Because to me, the cause of liberalism demands rejection of this entire Wright issue.

Why? It is what it is. It's affecting the election. Your demand of rejection won't change that."

Not in the short term, no, it won't. But someone has to stand up for principle for the long term, otherwise it disappears.

For instance, back when I was a kid, rejection of capital punishment was a core liberal issue.

It was a matter of principle.

Yet because of Clintonism, it's no longer even an issue, let alone a liberal one. It's ceded ground.

If you want to argue it was expendable ground, fine, make the argument, but the end result is one of the core tenets of liberalism was summarily abandoned because of one administration's abandonment of it.

Some ground I can't countenance seeing ceded. We should all have a line to draw on this count, and our consciences alone can dictate where that line is for us personally.

I know where my lines are and I make no apology for that.

"It really won't. People's response to the Wright issue is visceral; it's not intellectual. With some people Obama has always been on probation. Wright merely tips them rightward."

Agreed. But this is a huge problem and one that falls to liberals to fight against, not pander to.

If we cannot band together on this issue and say NO!--this is an issue we are in solidarity about, electoral politics be damned, then we become part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

"I do wonder where you live that you seem to have so little acceptance of these political realities.

I have lived in Yonkers, Iowa, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Iowa again and now New Haven, with a fair amount of time spent as well in Europe over the years. It's true that my circles have been mostly academic/professional, with the exception of my childhood and adolescence, which was spent in Yonkers at the height of its racial tensions over bussing in the 1980s.

"I have spent my entire life in Texas and the desert Southwest, with a brief stay in California. In Texas, last year, a school bus driver was caught making black children sit in the back of the bus. A school was caught segregating their classrooms by putting white children only in advanced classes and deliberately sticking black and Hispanic children, whatever their skills, in less advanced classed. They said they were trying to please the demands of the richer white parents who were part of an enclave in their district. They were afraid of white flight.

These are ugly realities, but realities nevertheless."

To be sure, but I'm not sure the point you're trying to make.

These sorts of tactics, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of Reverend Wright's church?" are repugnant.

Liberals should denounce them, period.

"It is a little hard to do that considering that I agree with lateagain on the reasons I think Obama hewed to Wright's church. You seem to forget that Obama himself has denounced some of Wright's views. Do you want to handicap him with unrealistic demands? He needs to be able to manuveur. Can he distance himself from Wright and still hold on the his black constituency? Because if he can't, he will bleed left and right."

Sorry, I'm losing your point here. I'm not talking about what Obama should or shouldn't be able to do politically, I'm talking about what we, as liberals do to reject abhorrent tactics and repugnant narratives and anti-intellectualism.

I'm not against discussing the issue per se, but I am against discussing it in a reckless, superficial way.

If we're really going to talk about it, we need to do so not in a polemical way, but in a seriously analytical and philosophical way. We should be prepared especially to allow that some things in this world are grey and that the very frame, demanding Obama to react and distance himself from...from what, exactly--Wright? Black culture? Black liberation theology? A couple of the points of Wright's sermon? The fact that he's black?

There's just an entire history here. Obama's history, Wright's history, the church's history, American history, black history...

Liberals are supposed to stand for education against superstition and ignorance and prejudice. Pandering to these things out of a sense of "realism" may be tactically expedient, but there are hidden costs, such as validating what liberals should consider a fundamentally wrong world view.

That arguably has much deeper and longer-term consequences than the outcome of any given election.

Again, I'm an historian so I'm accustomed to think in terms of decades and centuries. That's just the perspective I bring to the table.