WASHINGTON -- Is the controversy over Barack Obama 's pastor, retired from the pulpit but not from the spotlight, a candidacy-breaker or just a brouhaha?

One dictionary definition of the latter is "minor episode involving excitement, confusion, etc. " So the answer is whether voters see the views of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as a window on Obama 's character and conviction, or merely as a titillating distraction.

Obama himself may at first have regarded the flap as only a diversion from his serious campaign for the presidency. But Wright 's ranting in his National Press Club speech obviously convinced his former parishioner that he had to deal with it head-on.

Wright for his part made the tactical mistake of dismissing Obama 's initial mild disassociation with him as simply opportunistic, saying "he had to distance himself (from me) because he 's a politician. " Obama shot back that the notion that he was just engaging in "political posturing " was what really got him steamed enough to make an unqualified denunciation.

Now the question is where the controversy goes from here. Wright, having exposed himself has a self-centered egotist, would be wise to say no more. But as Obama himself has observed, the man has the right to say whatever he wants.

As for Obama, he must not permit the episode to detour his campaign from the high road of optimism and political as well as racial conciliation that brought him to the brink of nomination, before Wright 's divisive words threatened to throw it into a ditch.

In an unfortunate matter of timing, but a politically serendipitous one for rival Hillary Clinton, Obama followed the airing of Wright 's first incendiary comments with his lapse into campaign psychology in San Francisco. His inartful description of religion and gun ownership as sanctuaries for small-town Americans "bitter " about their economic state enabled Clinton to cast him as out of touch with them.

For a candidate conspicuously stymied by his failure in Ohio and Pennsylvania to capture the votes of white, blue collar workers who had supported for him in the Wisconsin and Virginia primaries, that was a message Obama didn 't need. He is laboring now to win them in next Tuesday 's primary in Indiana, which has a similar demographic profile to neighboring Ohio.

Obama 's losses among white small-towners there and in Pennsylvania, twinned with the Wright flap, have encouraged the Clinton camp to intensify the argument that Obama is unelectable, without overtly suggesting that white voters are reluctant to put an African-American in the White House.

In the most obvious parallel, voter resistance to John F. Kennedy as a Catholic in 1960, Kennedy took on the issue in the primary in West Virginia, where only about 5 percent of the population was Catholic. He beat Hubert Humphrey handily.

Then, in September in a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, he specifically told the Protestant group, "I am not the Catholic candidate for president, I am the Democratic Party 's candidate who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters and the church does not speak for me. "

Obama in his second response to Wright, similarly said that his old pastor did not speak for him. Whether he will have to continue making the point may depend on whether Wright, after his media plunge into the glare of television cameras, desists or forces Obama to address the issue again.

In any event, if Obama survives the Wright episode and is nominated with or without the support of those white blue-collar voters who eluded him in those most recent primaries, he can be certain he will face a re-run in the fall election.

John McCain is too wise to inject himself into any discussion or race or religion. But if the Republican Party doesn 't do so, overtly or by implication, Obama can expect that one or more of the shadow "independent expenditure " organizations of the sort that "swift-boated " John Kerry in 2004 and "Willie-Hortoned " Michael Dukakis in 1988 will not hesitate in some fashion.

In 1960, JFK deftly cleared his religious hurdle. Obama 's is more racial and than religious, and a tougher political test for him.

Witcover is journalist, author and columnist. His latest book, on the Nixon-Agnew relationship, "Very Strange Bedfellows, " has just been published by Public Affairs Press. You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@)earthlink.net.