Midway through E.L. Doctorow's best-selling novel Ragtime, there is a scene in which Walker, a black piano player, enters the home of the upstate New York family he's accidentally met in the first decade of the twentieth century. Walker, who "didn't act or talk like a colored man," is slowly endearing himself to this family by his weekly Sunday calls on their family's colored maid, Sarah, who at first refuses to see him. Father, who eventually lets the Negro take tea in his home only because President Roosevelt had recently given dinner to Booker T. Washington, even found himself pulled in by Walker's dignity and ample self-regard.

Then a curious thing happens. Walker enters the back door this time, in plain view of the family of Sarah, and greets everyone. That is not what is strange. What is strange is that for the first time, "Father recognized certain dangers in the man. . . . There is something reckless about him. Even Matthew Henson knew his place."

For a scene that was set in racist America one hundred years ago, from those first inklings of an understanding between the races, the emotional undertones sure do feel a lot like what I feel today during this presidential campaign. Except I can't tell if it's Jesse Jackson now playing the role of Father or if it's still the 'man.'

There is something regal about Obama, to be sure. The way he carries himself! We haven't seen this since the days of the Rat Pack. And he's black. Does that make him suspicious -- to some people? I tend to think so. Like Father. Younger Brother and Mother are not recorded to have felt that way about Coalhouse Walker, perhaps a testimony to the long headwinds of racial hatred people of goodwill have had to prevail against.

Jackson expressed deep regret over the crude remarks he made over a "hot mic" about Obama "talking down to black people." We all know that by now. I'm still asking myself, though, why did he do it. Was it intentional? Or not?

For starters, we already know that months ago Jackson accused Obama of "acting too white" or something along those lines. It wasn't said to his face, but word got out. Now he thinks the lectures Barack Obama has been giving to black churches and black people recently have been talking down to them.

Fact is, Barack Obama is now the leading civil rights figure in America at this moment. Period, like it or not. I'm sure the bewilderment in Jackson as to how that happened so rapidly is very real. I'm just not sure, though, that he despises Obama so much that he wasn't willing to help him along. In exchange for something.

This is Father "I Will Survive" Pfleger all over again. That incident, in which Father Pfleger mocked Mrs. Clinton at Trinity Church, gave Obama the excuse he needed to do the Heisman on Jeremiah Wright. This time he gets to do the Heisman on Jesse Jackson, severing virtually the last vestiges to the old, delapidated structural black leadership in this country. Ties to it would ensure he wouldn't get elected. Guaranteed. Given that Phil Gramm would hand the Obama campaign another gift the day after the Jackson story broke, it was a double whammy back-to-back.

It was a good week for the Obama campaign.