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ideology can be found in many of Obama’s remarks. For instance, when Obama says, “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody,” he is channeling Jeremiah Wright. This should come as no surprise, since Wright’s influence on Obama was unrivaled for more than twenty years. And those were Obama’s formative years when his core beliefs took shape. Not even Michelle Obama held such intellectual and political sway over her husband.
    Jeremiah Wright became far more than a religious and spiritual guide to Obama; he was his substitute father, life coach, and political inspiration wrapped in one package. At each step of Obama’s career, Wright was there with practical advice and counsel. Wright encouraged Obama to make a career of politics, and he offered to hook up Obama with members of Trinity United Church of Christ who had money and important connections. After Obama lost the congressional election to Bobby Rush and Michelle talked about divorcing him, a despondent Obama went to Wright for help. “Pick yourself up!” Wright exhorted him. “Pick yourself up!”
    It would be no exaggeration to say that Jeremiah Wright was the person who fulfilled Obama’s father-hunger, repaired his fractured ego, and prepared him to run for president.

    Neither Obama nor Jeremiah Wright has ever told the full story of how they came together. In the summer of 1985—four years before he met Michelle and seven years before he married her—Obama approached the Reverend Lacy Kirk “L. K.” Curry to seek his help in organizing black churches in Chicago’s African-American communities. Curry was the legendary minister of the Emmanuel Baptist Church and the president of Chicago’s Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, where Jeremiah Wright had once been a member of the board of directors. Obama struck Curry as cocksure and overconfident, and he told the young community organizer, “You know what your problem is, young man? You need to know a preacher who knows more than you do. You need to go talk to Jeremiah Wright.”
    And so that summer, Obama went to see Wright, whose sermons, in the words of David Mendell, one of Obama’s early biographers, “sometimes more [resembled] left-wing political rants than religious preaching.”
    “What I remember,” Wright said when I asked him about his first meeting with Obama, “is that he came to talk to me as a community organizer, not in search of Christ. I said what Joseph’s brothers in the Bible said when they saw him coming across the field: ‘Behold this dreamer!’ Barack came to me with this dream, man. He wasn’t from Chicago and he was gonna organize all these different churches—Catholic churches and black churches—on Chicago’s far South Side. And I’m saying, ‘You can’t organize the black churches. You don’t know the black church. Listen, man, we got Baptists who won’t speak to Presbyterians ’cause they don’t immerse. We got Church of God and Christ who don’t speak to Baptists because they don’t speak in tongues. You ain’t gonna organize no churches.’”
    My interview with Wright, who, at seventy years of age, is retired from the pulpit at Trinity, took place on a bleak November morning in his current office on the campus of the Kwame Nkrumah Academy, a charter school that is named after the late Marxist dictator of the West African nation of Ghana. Since retiring, Wright has moved from his modest quarters in Trinity’s parsonage to a new million-dollar mansion along a golf course in the posh Tinley Park section of Chicago.
    As might be imagined, I had serious reservations about meeting with Wright, whose vitriolic sermons demonizing white people and portraying the United States as evil had turned him into a pariah in most parts of America. Yet, I discovered that despite Wright’s dreadful excesses, his harebrained ideas, and his outright bigotry, he was still respected in large swaths of Chicago’s African-American