“A change is comin.”  So says the Reverend Jeremiah Wright over and over again.  During his incendiary but brutally honest “Pastor Ambition Tour,” he has proclaimed that “a change is comin’.  I can feel it.”   I say “brutally honest” because despite what you may think of Reverend Wright, he tells you exactly what he thinks, and he means what he says.  Sure, he changes his tone based on his audience: to white audiences (Bill Moyers, the National Press Club), he’s softer-spoken, and he doesn’t drop his “g’s.”

To black audiences, he’s a podium-slamming, fist-pounding, neo-segregationist with a penchant for mocking white people.  But regardless of how it’s delivered, the message is the same: black liberation theology, which demands an “apology” for slavery from the current generation, formal U.S. government prostration, and ultimately, reparations.  And that, of course, is just be the beginning.  The list of grievances to be redressed is lengthy, with new insults added all the time.

Wright doesn’t profess to believe in anything else.  In that sense, he’s much less a dissembler than either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.

This brings us to the Reverend’s longtime spiritual and intellectual student.  There is Obama, campaigning in Indiana and North Carolina, gymnasiums and podiums festooned with HIS central theme:  “Change We Can Believe In.”

After hearing Wright define exactly what he means and what he thinks, it is now impossible for Obama to dodge telling us exactly what HE means and what HE thinks.  Wright’s speeches are now a call for specificity from Barack Obama.  The days of allowing Obama to leave himself as an undefined, vague, “Hope, Unity, and Change Guy” must end.

It is now incumbent on Obama to tell us what HE means by “change.”  Is his use of “change” the same as Wright’s?  Senator: you sat at his feet, absorbing his teachings like a sponge for 20 years.  How does Wright’s version of “change” agree with yours?  Or differ from yours?

By the way, Senator, what IS your version of “change?”

How can we vote for “Change We Can Believe In” when you won’t even tell us what, exactly, we are “believing in?”

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