Many of Senator Obama’s supporters are wondering why what Jeremiah Wright said once or says now really matters to Senator Obama’s campaign. It’s a disingenuous question, but it deserves an honest answer.

Let’s take another hypothetical case. Mine. My father’s best boyhood friend was a Communist when he was a teenager. He was anti-World War II when it began, and had no interest in stopping Hitler from conquering Europe. But when Hitler turned on Stalin, he declared it was his duty to protect the Soviet Union and tried to enlist. After the war he became a Reform Rabbi, and, I’m sure, ceased being a Communist. But suppose he remained a proselytizing Communist, that I was a member of his temple for my whole adult life, and let him educate my children - and then ran for President. Would it matter?

Not much, because I have a lifetime record - which includes many failures, alas, in my academic, business and journalistic careers, as well as in my personal life, mixed in with occasional successes (of the random and undeserved nature of lightning strikes). Voters would have plenty of data to evaluate my fitness and qualifications to be their President, because I have hurt, bored and irritated many thousands of people as my life progressed through its nearly five decades. I have looked at myself through the eyes of my fellow-citizens, hard. I conclude that I decline to run for the Presidency and if elected I will not serve.

Given the record of my life, the fact that my (fictional) Rabbi was a practicing, voluble Communist, defending Stalin through his campaign of mass murder to the bitter end, would hardly be germane, because I have left muddy tracks through my life.

Unlike me, and unlike, in fact, most adults, Senator Obama is a tabula rasa, who has left few footprints in the sand.

For someone who has devoted his adult life to public service (as he describes himself), he has had almost no impact on his world. The grants that he doled out on behalf of the Annenberg fund would still have been issued to the same people. The bills that he signed on to in the Illinois state Senate would have passed, or failed to pass, had he never been elected.

The people in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago where he worked as a community organizer remain today as they were in my own South Side youth, relatively poorer and living less well than their neighbors (although much of the South Side outside Woodlawn has been transformed by private investment).

The United States Senate would have enacted or failed to enact the same laws had Senator Obama never been born. The South Side and the public education system of Chicago, the state of Illinois, the condition of the United States all testify to the nullity of Senator Obama’s life thus far.

Senator Obama’s personal charm has made many people listen to him, admire him, even love him - but he can’t produce anyone outside his family, except the stockholders of his book publishers, whose life has been transformed, or even slightly touched, by his presence or absence. He is a one-man refutation of the premise of Capra’s movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Given Senator Obama’s vacuity - and I use the word not to denigrate him but describe him - is it any wonder that the public and the press seize upon the thought and life of the Reverend Mr. Wright to give some sense, some color, some content to his life and character? Both of Obama’s books testify to the intellectual and moral significance Mr. Wright has had on his life.

But it is really the absence of content and accomplishment in Obama’s life that draws so much attention to the Wright material. The Reverend Mr. Wright’s sermons are only as important as the life of Obama has been meager. And unfortunately for Obama - and for the rest of us - that life has been very meager indeed. The Book of Jeremiah Wright matters because there is no corresponding text: the Acts of Obama.

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