We all have our own way of dealing with anger and so does Barack Obama.

Some scream and shout and rant and rave, others go silent in retreat in order to nurse their wounds. Still others find that delicate middle ground where they are able to healthfully express their feelings without losing their tempers.

Then there are those who in perfect passive-aggressive behavior set it up for all around them to act out the emotions they either don’t feel comfortable expressing or are too afraid to express.

The passive-aggressive machinations of Senator Barack Obama during this campaign have been fascinating to observe. Mostly unflappable on the outside the man is uncomfortably one-dimensional in his emotional expression, on the surface even-tempered to a fault. On the rare occasion that Obama does let his feelings through he comes off somewhat peevish, sometimes sarcastic and at times petulant while he holds his anger in check.

As self-controlled as Obama is he seems to surround himself with people with a much larger emotional life. His wife Michelle can only be characterized as angry. She makes outrageous statements, perhaps the statements her husband can’t make himself even though the thoughts she expresses may be the same thoughts that her husband feels. “One day black folks are going to wake up and they’re going to get it,” she once emoted. “And let me tell you something, for the first time in my adult lifetime I am really proud of my country,” she said angering many.

Obama’s recently unemployed foreign policy advisor Samantha Power was emotion run riot when she called Senator Hillary Clinton “a monster” during an interview with a foreign newspaper expressing the Obama Campaign’s angry sentiments toward Obama’s opponent. Ms. Power was forced to resign from the campaign but no one from the campaign recounted Ms. Power’s remark.

Many of the people in the inner circle of Obama’s life are fringe characters. Tony Rezko, the Chicago hood currently under indictment and a longtime Obama supporter both politically and financially; Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn of the Weatherman faction of SDS, the 60’s reactionaries so angry they advocated the overthrow of the United States government through a campaign of bombings, jailbreaks and riots; Rashid Khalidi, the PLO activist; Rev. Louis Farrakhan the controversial bigot and leader of the ire-filled Nation of Islam; Father Michael Phleger the activist Catholic priest who once called for the murder of a gun shop owner.

And, of course, there’s the now infamous Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr., Obama’s close friend and spiritual mentor whose incendiary words have become the subject of much discussion.

Although Barack Obama attempted to divorce himself from the angry tirades of his Rev. Wright in a Friday night blitz of the cable channels, once tapes of the venomous Wright were released, Sen. Obama’s poll numbers had begun to plummet. To save his candidacy, Obama turned to what he does best, he gave a speech - on race.

There was nothing new in the speech, and it was far from one of his best. The speech called for America to unify and address the issue of race. Obama, who in the Friday blitz had denied having personally heard his preachers’ lunatic rants admitted in a flip-flop that yes, indeed, he had. In his speech, he steadfastly remained loyal to his mentor and refused to separate his life from Wright’s.

"I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe," the Senator said.

After the speech, the pundits did what was to be expected. They had torn the candidate down after being accused of giving him a free ride, and now they would lift him up by calling him honest (like Abe) and brilliant (like Kennedy) and extraordinary (like MLK) and they would all feel better about themselves in doing so.

But while the pundits genuflected over Obama, I could only think about a passage in his book, “The Audacity of Hope,” the title, oddly enough, inspired by the angry preacher Rev. Wright.

The young Barry (Obama’s name until he changed it when a young man) was sitting in a library in Indonesia waiting for his mother to come and get him. He picked up a magazine and saw a photograph of a man whose hands had “a strange, unnatural pallor.”

Obama described the man in the picture as having “crinkly hair, heavy lips and a broad, fleshy nose.” At first young Barry thought the man was sick or a radiation victim. Then he read the text that went with the picture and understood that the black man had received a chemical treatment to lighten his complexion.

Barry read further and learned that thousands of black men and women in America had undergone the same treatment as the black man in the photograph in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person.

“I felt my face and neck get hot,” Obama wrote of his reaction to the picture. “My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page…I had a desperate urge to jump out of my seat…but something held me back. As in a dream, I had no voice for my newfound fear. By the time my mother came to take me home, my face wore a smile and the magazines were back in their proper place. The room, the air, was quiet as before.”

But was Obama?