After 20 years of friendship, if Obama didn't know Wright held these beliefs he's a moron and if he did know he's a fraud.
It's better for everybody that we assume Obama is a fraud, and it's almost certainly the correct explanation. As Bob Herbert wrote today, "Barack Obama went to Rev. Wright's church as a young man and was blessed with the Christian bona fides that would be absolutely essential for a high-profile political career." It was the cost of doing business. But Obama must think us all bitter morons to try and pass off this embarrassment as the product of some kind of ideological evolution on Wright's part. Is it that he didn't leave the church but the church left him? How many other members of the church do we expect will distance themselves at the sudden revelation that their (former) pastor is a vile racist?