Kathleen Parker thinks Obama is a magician. He was almost able to convince her to wear sunglasses in the moonlight. He tried to cast a very subtle and seductive guilt spell yesterday, and for many Americans, it may have worked.

But if Rev. Wright is to be viewed as the crazy old uncle, I’d like to compare Obama to the Magician’s Nephew from the first (if read in the order he intended) of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. In that story, the nephew means well. He wants to distance himself from his evil magician uncle. But the boy can’t help but be intrigued by the opportunity the magician offers. He wants to heal his ailing mother. His curiosity and his audacious hopefulness get the better of him and, in a hostile world, he touches a forbidden bell the sound of which unleashes a good deal of evil. If Obama really was a post-racial candidate, the speech he ought to have given yesterday would NOT have been about race. It would have been about his religion or the philosophy that informs his religion. Oh wait . . . it was. That’s why it was about race. But it was cleverly couched in a narrative we all might feel comfortable in swallowing. His attempt was to make the un-American seem American--though I am willing consider that he does not understand himself to be at odds with America’s founding principles. Whether he understands it or not, however, he will re-define what it means to be an American by insisting that the fulfillment of America’s promise means accepting a progressive agenda completely at odds with any fair reading of the meaning of liberty or equality. Like the magician’s nephew . . . he stepped in it. It will be up to others now to fix it.