Barack Obama finally decided he had had enough from his church yesterday and resigned as a member. The latest controversy was a white Catholic priest who has a long history of making comments that, while honest and expressing opinions that are held by many in the uber-liberal community, are just too “out there” for Obama.

Obama is, as I’ve said before, a different kind of politician than we’re used to seeing in a black political leader. The mold up until now has been the Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton type; they go around saying things like “we’re going to challenge the white man’s notion of superiority”. (That’s not a direct quote, but it’s the flavor of what many of these guys have said.)

It stems from frustration and a desire to shake things up, to try and shock people out of their complacency, but what it winds up doing is scaring white people who are- as Obama correctly pointed out in his stellar speech about race in America- afraid that they’re losing out.

If, during layoffs, you lost your good paying middle class job at the auto plant while a black collegue kept his to meet affirmative action numbers, you are naturally going to be angry and upset and scared about where your mortgage money is coming from. It’s also natural that you’re going to be bent out of shape at black folks- even though they’re not really to BLAME for it- because in your mind, they’re getting something good for being black.

The reality is that the black guy is likely to lose his job anyway in the NEXT round of cuts, and that him being black isn’t the real root cause; the real root cause is that your company was being poorly run by moronic managers and wasn’t keeping up with global change. Your anger at the black dude is misplaced, but you don’t think about that when you see a parading poof like Sharpton making an ass of himself on the TV; you just think some pretty nasty thoughts.

Obama gets this. He understands that those old politics of division are something that their practitioners use to take advantage of people. It’s like how the Republican Party has, for so very long, taken advantage of pro-life people. The Republicans had both houses of Congress, 6 out of 9 seats on the Supreme Court, and the White House, for 6 years of George Bush’s Presidency. Did they ever seriously do anything about abortion?

Of course not, because they don’t REALLY want to do something about abortion. They just want to keep the pro-life crowd all fired up and angry and, most importantly, donating to the party and to their candidates.

Well, the racial politics were often similar. Your Jacksons and Sharptons gain a benefit from having people all angry and fired up; black people tended to vote monolithically, in a bloc for the Democrats- but then they were also easier to be pointed to by the opposition. The scary angry black man is a caricature used by white politicians to hold people in fear.

Obama gets all this, and it’s part of why I have really come to admire him. He wants to move past those times. He holds out his hand to the white guy fearing affirmative action (and the Scary Angry Black Man) and says “hey, I know why you’re feeling threatened, and it’s not without cause; times are tough for you.” But Obama isn’t forgetting his fellow African-Americans (although you can make an argument that since his African side of the family didn’t come over as a slave but rather was just this generation, he’s not fully sharing the “typical” black American experience) either; he’s saying “yeah, we’ve had it tough, and slavery set us back generations behind everyone else here, and racism still affects us”.

Regardless of all of this, Obama’s church (ironically enough) has become too big of an issue for him. Which, if you think about it, is pretty pathetic; when JFK ran he didn’t have to quit being a Catholic to assuage the fears of the voters.

Then again, the Catholic church was relatively mainstream enough that sticking by it wasn’t an issue. With too many preacher types playing the old school of politics and effectively taking advantage of Obama’s fame (and don’t think for a second that these guys didn’t know exactly what they were doing), Obama had to do something. It’s sad, though, that he had to take this step.

What’s really ironic is that there’s still a significant subculture of people who are spreading the “Obama is a closet Muslim” meme into society. Here he has all this trouble with a firey brand of evangelical Christianity, and there’s still people who would swear that since his middle name is Hussein, he must be a Muslim.

It’s an interesting problem. Nobody is really hammering McCain for his religious affiliations, even though some of these right-wing pastors he enthusiastically chased for endorsements have said things that are a lot more hate-filled, mean-spirited, and just plain nasty than anything that Wright or the latest guy have said in Obama’s church.

Ultimately, I hope that most people- even those that aren’t going to vote for Obama no matter what- can step back and realize that what’s important isn’t what some other guy- even a pastor or preacher- says, but rather what Obama and McCain say and what they’ll do as President.