Barack Obama's Secret Meetings with Reverend Wright, Hillary Clinton

In the cold light of hindsight, the "Reverend Wright Affair" seems even sillier and more overwrought than it did at the time. An excerpt from then-Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe's new book, "Renegade: The Making of a President," seems almost dated now. Wolffe describes a clandestine meeting between the two on the eve of Wright's re-emergence at the National Press Club:

They ended up talking at Wright's home, and Obama tried to adopt the tone of a concerned friend giving advice. He did not want to tell his former pastor what to do, but he did want to nudge him in the right direction by making him aware of what was about to happen. Wright wasn't heading for vindication; he was heading for vilification.

"Look, you're a pastor, you have your own role to play," Obama said. "But I can tell you how politics in the cable and blog age works. Here's what you need to anticipate: that it's going to be a media circus. But obviously, you need to do what you need to do."

The rest, as they say, is seemingly ancient history. Wright made a fool of himself, Barack Obama cut him loose once and for all, and his opponents bleated about some kind of bus, and the contents of its underside.

Wolffe also describes a tense tete-a-tete with Hillary Clinton, in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses. The anecdote is illuminating in several ways:

He was traveling to Des Moines for yet another debate and was getting ready to board his plane at the same time as Clinton was boarding hers, at Reagan National Airport. Clinton asked to talk to Obama and she apologized to him for comments by her New Hampshire co-chairman. Billy Shaheen had suggested that Republicans would exploit Obama's self-confessed drug use if he won the nomination. Such comments had no place in her campaign, Clinton assured Obama, and Shaheen would resign. But Obama was not satisfied: he felt it was part of a pattern, which included an email forwarded by a Clinton volunteer in Iowa, suggesting that he was Muslim. Clinton grew agitated, waving her arms and poking her finger at him, as she hurled his own negativity back at him. Wasn't he the one who just called her disingenuous for saying she couldn't release her own White House papers? Wasn't it his donor, David Geffen, who accused her and her husband of lying with ease? Instead of responding with anger, Obama tried to chill his rival, placing a hand on her arm. Clinton recoiled from the gesture, which seemed either patronizing or restraining, or both.

The tale of this tarmac showdown is chock full of intrigue, and it seems to deflate the Obama mythos somewhat. His Jedi mind trick didn't work on Hillary, for one thing. For another, having been offered an apology by Hillary, Barack committed a rare overreach, and it didn't work out. Perhaps this was a calibrating moment for his famous temperament.

Most revealing, though not surprising, was Obama's reaction to the encounter, coldly political but dead-on:

Obama boarded his plane with a new sense of wonder. "I never saw that look of concern in her eyes before," he told his senior aides. "I think we can win this one."

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