CHICAGO -- Barack Obama's years as a community organizer in Chicago are at once the most well-known and the least well-understood facet of his biography. It is common knowledge that the Democratic candidate got his start in politics on the city's predominantly black South Side. Yet the people who surrounded him in those days, and who ultimately would propel him to higher office, remain a mystery.

It follows that to evaluate Obama's campaign, and particularly its grand promises to transcend racial and partisan divides, it is first necessary to examine the community that Obama cites as his great education on race. And to do that, one must get to know those figures who not only were instrumental in Obama's rise but who have remained fervent supporters of his campaign and who, in turn, enjoy Obama's continued support.

One must begin with men like Father Michael Pfleger.

During a Good Friday service this March, Fr. Pfleger, a pastor at St. Sabina's church on Chicago's South Side, bounded up to the pulpit and launched into a scathing sermon against "the stupid people."

Despite the setting, Fr. Pfleger was not talking about those who had strayed from God. The targets of his scorn, rather, were those in the media - Pfleger singled out FOX's Bill O'Reilly and MSNBC for special opprobrium - who had dared to cast a critical eye on a local prophet, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

That Pfleger would commit his church to a full-throated defense of the controversial preacher was no coincidence. For Fr. Pfleger and Rev. Wright share more than a zip code. In the tightly knit world of Chicago's South Side, where churches dot nearly every street, Pfleger and Wright are close friends and political allies. And while Pfleger is white, he is in every other sense the mirror image of Rev. Wright. "Father Pfleger is the only black man I know in a white man's body," observes one Chicago pastor.

But Pfleger is not simply a white man heading a black congregation. He also is a devout preacher of the reigning catechism of the city's South Side. It is an ethos of perpetual disenfranchisement that surpasses class barriers, and which holds that America, now as in the era of Jim Crow, is a fundamentally oppressive nation, especially toward its black citizens.

The fact that Pfleger also is a longtime friend of Barack Obama underscores just how omnipresent this ethos was in the formative years of Obama's political career. And it casts fresh doubt on Obama's assurance that his roots in Chicago's black community make him the ideal candidate to chart a new course in racial relations.

St. Sabina advertises its politics on its door, literally: A blue poster on the rectory door proclaims, "We oppose war!" Inside St. Sabina's cathedral, one finds red, green, and black flags - the colors of black nationalism. In this respect the church, the largest black Catholic church and school in the Chicago archdiocese, is very much a vehicle for the political passions of Fr. Pfleger.

Although the idea of a white preacher as an apostle of Afrocentrism seems unusual, it is very much the product of Chicago's distinctive history. At the beginning of the last century, the city's South Side was home to European immigrants from Germany, Poland, Italy, and especially Ireland. In the 1930s, nearly a quarter of the Auburn Gresham, the community where St. Sabina's is located, were Irish. When the descendants of these residents moved out to the suburbs in the 1960s, they took their churches with them. So dramatic was the demographic shift that, by 2000, Auburn Gresham was 98 percent black. Among the few who church leaders who remained were those most active in the civil-rights movement, who stayed behind to minister to the South Side's new black residents.

Fr. Pfleger is very much a throwback to that time. One can hear it in the stridency of his sermons, which he delivers with a barking staccato that makes him sound like a prize-fight announcer. One can see it, as well, in the appeals he sometimes writes to his parishioners, which he signs with the now-quaint idiom of a New Left activist ("In the Pursuit of Justice") and in the fire-and-brimstone zeal that sometimes crosses the line from provocation into outright belligerence. Even some of Fr. Pfleger's supporters were discomfited when, during a May 2007 anti-gun rally at Chuck's Gun Shop in Riverdale, Illinois, Pfleger issued the following threat to the store's owner, John Riggio: "We're gonna find you and snuff youth out." Characteristic of his no-holds-barred style, Pfleger remains unapologetic about the incident.

Above all, Fr. Pfleger's radicalism is evident in the people that he has welcomed at St. Sabina. Prominent among them is Pfleger's friend - and Barack Obama's spiritual advisor - Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Outside of Chicago's South Side, Wright, now notorious for his "God damn America" sermon, is an embarrassment and a race-baiting demagogue. But for Pfleger, as for much of Chicago's South Side, he remains a revered icon.

"The idea that this preaching is divisive is absolutely ridiculous," Pfleger has said of the controversy around Wright. For most, Wright's claim that the U.S. government invented the "HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color" is a loathsome calumny. For Pfleger, such racially fraught rhetorical warfare is all part of the job. As he has put it: "The job of pastor is to shepherd his or her congregation, and that requires speaking to your congregants in the language and context they understand."

Unsurprisingly, Pfleger often invokes similar themes. Echoing Wright, he calls racism "America's addiction." Taking a cue from racial huckster Al Sharpton, a former guest at St. Sabina, Pfleger has waged campaigns against everyone from elementary school sports leagues to the Chicago Fire Academy, charging that these institutions are racist.

Efforts like these have won Pfleger high praise from Chicago's black community. "Father Mike is a man with a message for this messed-up age," says Sandra Riley, an evangelist at Chicago's Just For U Ministries. And if that message - of pervasive racism, of unending discrimination, of a national conspiracy to marginalize black Americans - sounds antithetical to the hopeful, post-racial tenor of Obama's presidential campaign, it is nonetheless the case that it is broadly appreciated by the thousands of parishioners, whether from solidly middle-class Auburn Gresham or from more humble parts like crime-ridden Englewood, who attend the South Side's countless churches.

It is a reflection of the corrosive political climate on Chicago's South Side, and of the unlikely alliances that local racial pathologies have helped forge, that Rev. Wright is not even the most extreme of Pfleger's allies. That dubious distinction better fits Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Like Wright, Farrakhan has been a frequent guest to St. Sabina. He has preached there on three different occasions. Loathed in the rest of the country, the minister has a friend in Fr. Pfleger. As for complaints that Farrakhan, who once called Hitler "a very Great man," is a bigot and an anti-Semite, Pfleger will not hear of it.

"Minister Farrakhan is probably one of the most misunderstood and mis-defined leaders of our day," Pfleger has said. "When you don't want to deal with someone's truth, you try to destroy their character or redefine them .His truth causes America to face its racism and its hypocrisy." That Farrakhan's "truth" includes a belief in black supremacism to rival the worst Ku Klux Klan propaganda is to Pfleger, and to much of the South Side's black community, insignificant.

To understand Farrakhan's prominence here - Rev. Wright is another supporter of the minister, and his Trinity United Church of Christ recently honored him with a lifetime achievement award - it helps to walk around the community.

Just around the corner from St. Sabina's, on 79th street, stands Salaam Restaurant. An immaculate white structure, it is identifiable by a decorative tower, bearing the Islamic star and crescent, which towers above a neighborhood of faded store-fronts, weather-beaten row houses, "Soul Food" eateries and hair salons. Built for $5 million in 1995, the restaurant is an advertisement for the influence of its famous owner: Louis Farrakhan. (Farrakhan's daughter, Maria Farrakhan Muhammad, is said to have designed the pricey interior d‚cor.)

That influence is everywhere to be seen. A fading white painted sign on the side of a brick building advertises Farrakhan's radio show. ("Hear Minister Louis Farrakhan.") An awning plugs lectures by the minister. To most Americans, Farrakhan is a racist. Here he is a pillar of the community, a man you would not wish to cross.

Fr. Pfleger, in any case, has no wish to do so. On the contrary, he cannot praise enough the man he unabashedly calls his "mentor." As he told The Trumpet, the newsmagazine of Rev. Wright's Trinity United Church: "Contrary to those who want to make him anti-white and anti-Semitic, I believe Minister Farrakhan is presently building the umbrella for people of conscience to come together no matter the race or creed. I am honored to call him my brother." It was surely the first time that the man who seethes at Jewish "bloodsuckers" was hailed as an agent of interfaith harmony.

Pfleger's political activism and his relationship with figures like Wright and Farrakhan might be of merely parochial interest, a curious glimpse into the troubling ties that run through Chicago's South Side, were it not for the fact that Fr. Pfleger also is close to the most famous politician to pass through the community.

Pfleger says that he has known Obama for over twenty years. And while Obama worshipped at Wright's Trinity Church, he is known to have made frequent visits to St. Sabina. Indeed, in one of the promotional videos for St. Sabina`s, the Democratic candidate can be conspicuously seen in the congregation.

Obama, to be sure, does not seem to share the racial hang-ups of his South Side supporters. In his often-insightful autobiography, Dreams From My Father (1995), he dismisses the black-power movement as a "corrosive force" that denies individual identity in its vision of blacks as constant victims. But if Obama is unwilling to accept all the convictions of the black community, neither is he prepared to sever his ties with those who, like Fr. Pfleger, shamelessly stoke racial tensions and undermine Obama's sincere efforts to move past the struggles of old.

This reluctance may explain why the Obama campaign seems strangely unembarrassed by the candidate's association with Fr. Pfleger. On the campaign website, Pfleger is touted as one of the "people of faith for Obama," and the site features a testimonial from Pfleger likening Obama to Robert F. Kennedy.

Yet, the relationship raises troubling questions about Obama's judgment. After all, the racially charged, Afro-centric sermons that have forced Obama to distance himself publicly from Rev. Wright are no different than those that can be heard weekly at Pfleger's St. Sabina's church. Sometimes it can be difficult to tell the two institutions apart. On a recent evening, for instance, St. Sabina's played host to a sermon by the Reverend Otis Moss, a prot‚g‚ of Rev. Wrights who is currently the main pastor at his Trinity United Church. (Making clear his debt to Wright, Moss in his sermon likened media criticism of the reverend to the crucifixion of Christ.) Whatever criticism can be leveled at Wright can be directed, with equal justice, at Fr. Pfleger.

And there may be more at issue than the company Obama keeps. For instance, while Obama has promised to follow a new political model, one above the partisan jousting of Washington, his connection to Pfleger suggests that Obama is a practitioner of that oldest brand of partisanship: patronage politics. Thus, the Chicago Tribune has reported that between 1995 and 2001, when Obama was a state senator, Pfleger contributed some $1,500 to the young politician's campaign. In what seems suspiciously like a quid pro quo, Obama later would pad the state budget with earmarks to favored constituents, steering some $225,000 in grants to St. Sabina. Despite condemning "business-as-usual in Washington," Obama now stood revealed as a veteran of the traditional approach.

Michael Pfleger is not easily confused with Barack Obama. To Obama's smooth, calming approach, he is gruff and outraged. Listen more closely, however, and it's hard not to discern some similarities. When, in one recent sermon, Fr. Pfleger preached to his congregation -- "We can recover!" "We can recover!" -- it was impossible to miss the echo of Obama's stump slogan, "Yes we can."

Now, as Obama seeks to distinguish himself from the likes of Rev. Wright, he must show that such echoes are only that. And he must explain, more adequately than he has to date, why voters should bet on him to achieve the racial reconciliation that his close friends and advisors, including Fr. Pfleger, have only served to delay.

On a recent afternoon, the staffers of Chicago's Third Ward district seemed stumped over a seemingly simple question: where was Dorothy Tillman? First elected in 1985, Tillman worked here for over twenty years, until her defeat last year at the hands of challenger Pat Dowell. Now no one at her former office could say how the ex-alderwoman could be reached.

The question may seem of merely local interest, but in fact it has a national valence. For Tillman is more than just a marquee name in Chicago politics. She is also known to have a close friendship with the most prominent politician to emerge from the city in recent years, Senator Barack Obama. It is a testament to that friendship that during his 2004 senate run, Tillman, the legendary political boss of Chicago's largely black Third Ward, was among the politicians whose backing for the fresh-faced former community organizer helped deliver him Chicago's predominantly black wards, where Obama won more than 90 percent of the vote -- no small achievement for a novice politician struggling to emerge from the shadow of iconic South Side figures like ex-Black Panther Rep. Bobby Rush, who defeated Obama in a 2000 Congressional race. More recently, Obama reaffirmed his relationship with Tillman when, to the dismay of much grassroots opposition, he endorsed her last year in an ultimately unsuccessful quest to retain her post as assemblywoman for the Third Ward.

And yet that defeat, which dramatically reduced Tillman's profile, also marked a small victory for Obama, if only in terms of public relations. Indeed, no one benefits more from Tillman's sudden anonymity than the senator. As he struggles to broaden his appeal across the country, especially among the white, working-class voters who remain skeptical of his candidacy, the last thing Obama needs is for further scrutiny to be directed at the circle of controversial supporters and political allies in Chicago who aided his rise from lowly activist to senator to would-be president of the United States. A case in point is Obama's longtime friendship with his outspokenly anti-American pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, which precipitated a damaging political backlash against his campaign that has yet to subside.

Dorothy Tillman is another such figure. A veteran of Chicago's combative politics, Tillman possesses one of the city's more outsize personalities. Best known for her collection of garish, broad-brimmed hats and her unstable behavior -- she once brandished a handgun at a City Council meeting --Tillman also has gained fame or infamy, depending on whom one consults, for her revealed record of municipal corruption, her uncompromising views on race, and her professed anti-Americanism. It is precisely those views that underlie her support for black empowerment, an ideological obsession that, as in the case of Jeremiah Wright, sometimes has shaded into overt racism. Meanwhile, Tillman's preferred causes -- prominent among them her championing of reparations for slavery -- place her well outside the mainstream of the American electorate even as they endear her to many in Chicago's black community.

Now, as Obama makes his pitch to the American people -- a pitch resting largely on the biracial candidate's presumed ability to resolve racial disputes and to distance himself from the corrupt ways of establishment Washington -- his ties to politicians like Dorothy Tillman raise troubling questions about his judgment, his independence, and his ability to bring about the "change" that has been the rhetorical cornerstone of his presidential campaign.

Tillman's political résumé has a certain heft. She began her career in her native Alabama, where at the age of 16 she joined the civil-rights movement and worked as an organizer with Dr. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). When King decided to shift his operations from the South to Chicago in 1965, Tillman was sent to the city to lay the groundwork for his arrival.

She struggled with this charge. The black and white moral situation in the segregated South, which made organizing relatively easy (if physically dangerous) there dissolved into gray ambiguity in the north, where racism was more subtle and where a local black power structure was invested in the status quo. The confrontational style of Southern activists like Tillman ill-suited Chicago's black residents, and the reception she received was not a warm one. "Blacks in Chicago actually allowed other blacks to go on television and say they were not wanted in Chicago," Tillman would later complain. "As a matter of fact, we could not find a church pastored by a black minister…that would give the SCLC office space. Therefore, we ended up with a white pastor." Outraged, Tillman dismissed Chicago's blacks as "Uncle Toms."

Primarily to blame for the weakness, as she saw it, of the black community, was Chicago's machine politics. In her judgment, it had made blacks dependent on the patronage of the city's white Democratic establishment. So debilitating was this dependence, Tillman charged, that "[b]lacks in this city were worse off than any plantation down South."

Tillman, along with more radical elements in the black community, settled on a single solution: What was needed was a politics of black empowerment that would build up an independent black political machine to counter the dominant white one that had coopted black leadership since the turn of the century.

Tillman would get her chance to realize this vision in the 1984. When elected alderman Tyrone Kenner was forced out of the city council after being convicted for extortion (he had been collecting commissions for "selling" city jobs), then-mayor Harold Washington tapped Tillman to fill the vacancy. Despite initial resistance -- one alderman reportedly refused to support the appointment because Tillman had called him an obscene name -- she won the backing of the council and the voters. For the next 23 years, Tillman would represent the Third Ward in the City Council. In that time, her tenure would come to be distinguished less by any significant accomplishments than by Tillman's advocacy of some decidedly sectarian causes.

Of these the most polarizing was reparations for slavery. It does not exaggerate her role in the reparations movement to say that during her time in elected politics Tillman was its leading -- and arguably most acerbic -- proponent. In 2001, for instance, Tillman hosted the first ever "National Reparations Convention for African-American Descendants of African Slaves" in Chicago. Under Tillman's direction, the convention drafted a "national plan" that would have compelled the federal government and American corporations to provide reparations to the descendants of American slaves.

Never a serious contender for adoption into law, the plan nevertheless cast a spotlight on Tillman's radical views on race and her rabid anti-Americanism. "America," Tillman has said, "is one of the cruelest nations in the world when it comes to black folks." Only reparations could atone for this cruelty. "America would not be the America it is today without slavery," Tillman has claimed.

Nor had the country made any progress since the slave era, in her opinion. Slavery, Tillman insisted, had "put the freed slaves and their descendants at a disadvantage that will never be overcome without reparations" -- a statement that surely would have come as a surprise to the nearly fifty percent of black Americans who today own their own homes and who have made steady gains in the American economy in recent decades. But evidence of expanding opportunity and growing prosperity for black Americans failed to impress Tillman. Declaring that "America owes blacks a debt," she pledged to accept nothing less than full reparations as just recompense.

Extreme as it is by national standards, the reparations issue nevertheless enjoys broad support in communities like Chicago's South Side. That Tillman adopted it as her signature cause only improved her political fortunes. It is telling that in 1987, when Obama was in the early stages of his career as a community organizer, Tillman carried the Third Ward with nearly 80 percent of the vote. Later, when Obama courted the black establishment to support his political ambitions, he would directly benefit from the clout that politicians like Tillman had amassed by championing racially divisive but locally popular causes.

And it is here that Obama's political roots on the South Side become particularly problematic. It would be sufficiently embarrassing for Obama to be associated with the leader of an unabashedly racial cause that alienates most Americans. But ever worse for the candidate's ambitions to inspire the country is that Tillman is not the only member of Obama's support group in Chicago to have taken up the cause of reparations. In June of 2007, the chapter of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations (NCOBRA) in America held its annual conference in Philadelphia. Consistent with its mission to win reparations for the "genocidal war against Africans" created by the slave trade and its alleged "continuing vestiges," NCOBRA selected a keynote speaker who shared its extreme views. That speaker was none other than Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

It's impossible to understand the popularity of reparations in communities like Chicago's South Side without first understanding the worldview from which the spring. Unmistakably racial, it is a view that sees blacks as prisoners of American history, incapable of improving their lot without the aid of the federal government and the crutch of black solidarity.

No one speaks for that view with more determination than Dorothy Tillman. In 2001, the alderwoman touched off a citywide scandal when she made a racial scene at a restaurant. While attending a political reception at Chicago's posh Palmer House Hilton hotel, Tillman reportedly demanded that she be served by only black waiters. Two white waiters later brought suit against Tillman, charging that she had them removed from the reception. Even Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was moved to reproach Tillman, chiding that "I can't say to you that, because you're black, white, Hispanic, Asian or a woman or male or your sexual orientation and I don't like you, you have no right to serve me. That's not what we stand for."

In fact, it was what Tillman stood for. In the aftermath of the scandal, the alderwoman seemed genuinely puzzled what all the fuss was about. "It is not personal against anybody. I am just pro-my people," she explained, adding: "Being pro-black is not being pro-racist."

In the black community, meanwhile, Tillman was praised for her defiance. Jay Thomas Willis, a columnist for Louis Farrakhan's newspaper, The Final Call, hailed Tillman for her commitment to racial politics. "I admire Mrs. Tillman for speaking out on the issues and putting her money where her mouth is," he wrote. As for complaints of racism, these were not to be taken seriously: "Whenever blacks talk about getting what they want, whites call it reverse discrimination."

It comes as no surprise that Tillman's unapologetic commitment to racial politics also has won her the approval of one of the country's leading racists: her friend and fellow reparations advocate Louis Farrakhan. In 2005, Tillman was an honored guest at a lecture by Farrakhan, and returned the compliment by praising the minister as a patron of the community. "We have always supported the minister when others were running away," Tillman gushed. "I am thankful for the role for the role that we played."

Considering his campaign's promise to do-away with divisive politics, one might think that Obama would jump at the chance to distance himself from race-centric supporters like Tillman. So it is revealing of the candidate's lingering loyalties to radical black leaders like Tillman, and a sign of his deference to the popular prejudices of the community she represents, that he has failed forcefully to repudiate the politics of racial resentment that continue to thrive on Chicago's South Side.

Instead, Obama has staked out positions that might be characterized as evasive. That was most apparent on the fraught question of reparations. When asked by CNN's Anderson Cooper last July where he stood on reparations, Obama gave a rambling response in which he backed unspecified "investments" in education. And though he ultimately declined to join Dennis Kucinich in openly supporting reparations, his equivocal answer allowed him to please both the majority of the country that opposes them and those elements of the black community for whom they remain a cherished cause. As a demonstration of Obama's ability to appease different constituencies, it was an impressive performance. But those seeking real leadership from the candidate, not least on the fractious question of race, would have been disappointed.

Obama's relationship with Tillman undermines more than his promise to forge a national consensus on race. It also threatens his pledge to transcend the cynical corruption that, as he tells it, has made politics a dirty word. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a better example of dirty politics-as-usual than the career of Dorothy Tillman.

It was not supposed to be that way. Not least because she was replacing a disgraced public official, Tillman's appointment to City Hall in 1984 was hailed as part of a broader effort to renovate the city's black communities. "When I first came here, I inherited a very corrupt, dirty, nasty ward, and we came in and launched a clean-up campaign," Tillman would later recall.

But the campaign foundered from the start. Premised on two conflicting aims -- to eliminate corruption on the one hand, to promote black empowerment at all costs on the other -- Tillman's tenure often fell short of the grand hopes with which it began. Before long, critics took to charging that Tillman abused her authority as alderwoman in order to secure city funds for development projects. While community groups had their requests denied, Tillman seemed always to have her hands on the city's purse strings.

Allegations of this sort came to a head in 2006. A local newspaper, Lakefront Outlook, decided to launch an investigation into Tillman's financial books. What it discovered was a pattern of suspicious financial irregularities stemming from her pet project, a taxpayer-funded facility called the Harold Washington Center. According to the paper's findings, the center, built directly across the street from Tillman's war office, was marred by tax violations, its operations no more improved by the fact that Tillman was engaging in blatant nepotism, hiring family members to staff the financially troubled institution. Thus, one of Tillman's daughters ran both the center and the catering service that supplied it.

On the strength of these and other revelations, Tillman's challenger Pat Dowell, a former deputy executive in Chicago's Department of Planning and Development, was able to paint Tillman as being "out of touch with the people in the community." With her penchant for playing the race card -- Tillman had long adopted the tactic of assailing the mere presence political opposition as evidence of "racism" -- rendered ineffective against her black opponent, Tillman was voted out of office.

Tillman's loss came despite the support of most the city's black community, and her most prominent supporter was Senator Obama. Explaining that Tillman was "a very early supporter of my campaign" for the Senate, Obama endorsed Tillman in the Third Ward race.

It was in many ways a strange move. In light of Tillman's record of corruption and her comparatively thin record of achievement, Obama's support for the incumbent struck many as a betrayal of the political promises, especially ethics reform, that had gotten Obama elected in 2004. James Shapiro, the state chairman for the Independent Voters of Illinois-Independent Precinct Organization, noted that Obama's support for Tillman showed a preference for "political expedience" over principle. Media coverage was similarly critical. The Chicago Tribune suggested that Obama's endorsement "reflects his deference to Chicago's established political order and runs counter to his public calls for clean government."

For his part, Obama was unrepentant. There was no "conflict" between his support for ethical reform generally and his support for one of the city's most corrupt politicians, he said. And while the defense strained credulity, it demonstrated the debt that Obama still owed to politicians like Tillman.

That debt is well established. During his 2004 Senate run, Obama faced a powerful challenge from his opponent, multimillionaire businessman Blair Hull. With a $29 million campaign war chest that he used to court the city's black political class, Hull was heavily favored to win. Obama's endorsement by established black politicians like Tillman gave him a local credibility he lacked and, along with unconfirmed but scandalous claims that Hull had abused his ex-wife, helped lift the novice politician to an upset.

With his endorsement of Tillman in 2006, in the face of grassroots opposition, Obama repaid the favor. If doing so violated the high-minded rhetoric that has driven his campaign for president, it was nevertheless a price that Obama was willing to pay.

Barack Obama's defenders protest that their candidate does not share the more militant racial views of his allies on the South Side. This is likely true, but it is irrelevant. As a young organizer in the 1980s, Obama sincerely sought to improve the lot of blacks in troubled communities. In doing so, however, he assembled a community of vocal supporters whose political views, especially but not solely on matters of race, are an affront to the national reconciliation that the Illinois senator has said he hopes to achieve as president.

The story of Obama's meteoric ascent from Chicago's streets to the national stage is, in the end, the classic story of the Faustian bargain. To fuel his rise up the political ladder, Obama needed to downplay both his history, as the son of a white middle-class mother raised by his white grandparents, and his résumé, as the fortunate son who made his way from exclusive Hawaii private schools to the hallowed halls of Columbia and Harvard. In the world of Chicago's South Side, Obama found the answer in his alliance with radical religious figures like Rev. Wright and his political counterpart in Dorothy Tillman. The fact that he repaid their support with friendship and, when the opportunity arose, political backing, may be a credit to Obama's integrity. But it is a damning indictment of the kind of politics -- anti-ideological, non-partisan, post-racial -- that he now claims to represent.

For his hopeful platform to be credible, Obama must make the difficult decision to repudiate his more radical supporters on the South Side or risk the suspicion that he is unwilling -- or unable -- to do so. If the early evidence is any guide, Obama has made his choice. And he has chosen to stand with Dorothy Tillman.

By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com