Every day, keen eyes in the markets will search the administration's every move for threats to their way of life, the corporate compensation system with its fabulous bonuses. Yet if this president becomes an apologist for that bonus culture, it could destroy the fragile new voting coalition that carried him in November.

(Ron Elving is away. This is his last column until he returns in late April.)

One year ago this month, Barack Obama's presidential campaign was in mortal danger following the eruption of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor. Wright's incendiary sermons about race and America burst on the world via videotape, threatening to derail the candidate at the moment he had gained real momentum.

One year later, the candidate who survived that crisis is in the White House, facing his first big test as president. This time, there's far more than a campaign to lose; there is an entire presidential agenda at stake. And that's not to mention the health of the banks, the credit system and the entire economy.

In the days of the Wright furor, the still-little-known senator from Illinois faced a choice: Would he disavow the man who had baptized his daughters and helped him make his way in Chicago's black political community? Or would he give up on being a New Age prophet, a man of mixed race and hybrid ideology, breaking away from the racial political snares of the past?

A similar choice now confronts the still-unproven President Obama. Will he play the torchbearing populist of the left, the scourge of greed-heads on Wall Street? Or will he be the double-Ivy sophisticate, hip to high finance and the way that the world works and aware of how much he depends on it?

Here, as in the Wright matter, Obama is reaching not so much a fork in the road as a place where two parallel tracks suddenly converge. Until now, on the bank bailouts, his competing personalities have progressed quite nicely down their respective tracks. Now, the moment of collision has arrived.

The proximate cause of this collision is the revelation that big bonuses were paid this month to some of the very executives who brought the insurance giant AIG to its knees last fall. Big bonuses financed with taxpayer bailout money. The president said he was "stunned" and showed a flash of choler. He went after those unnamed malefactors who gambled billions on "highflying schemes."

But then, after the House of Representatives put teeth in its own snarl with a 90 percent tax on the bonuses, the chief executive seemed to recoil. The constitutional scholar re-emerged, and he changed his emphasis, questioning the use of the tax code to punish people.

The president did not go so far as to threaten a veto — the Senate is highly unlikely to pass the 90 percent tax, anyway — but he made it clear he knew Wall Street had its back up about its bonuses.

All this took place even as Treasury officials were leaking word of Secretary Timothy Geithner's new plan for buying up toxic mortgage assets to help the banks break the ice on lending. Would the Obama administration be willing to overlook some big payouts to big-time investors who help in this process? Well, yes, the president himself strongly implied, it would.

This shifting from one foot to the other is what politicians do. But it is not what great leaders do. And so far, at least, the president's handling of the various bailouts has been far from the man at his best.

Candidate Obama stepped up to the Wright crisis with a moving and memorable address on the issues of loyalty and race. He used the occasion to address an underlying tension in his candidacy and in the national consciousness. Almost instantly, that tension eased and that particular controversy faded.

Only now has he come upon another challenge equally perilous. Once again, he must walk a fine line in the midst of a firestorm. Every day, keen eyes in the markets will search the administration's every move for threats to their way of life, the corporate compensation system with its fabulous bonuses.

Yet if this president becomes an apologist for that bonus culture, it could destroy the fragile new voting coalition that carried him in November. He needs that movement behind him if he is to enact any elements of his ambitious program — let alone all of them.

To his credit, the president seems to understand these competing demands.

"People want a lot of contradictory things," he said on 60 Minutes Sunday. "The banks would love a lot of taxpayer money with no strings attached. Folks in Congress, as well as the American people, would love to fix the banks without spending any money."

A year ago, candidate Obama was willing to take on race and its history in our national life. His deft handling of all that enhanced his renown, not only as a speechmaker but as a leader — someone who could address even the most vexing political conflict head-on and emerge stronger than ever.

Maybe now it's time for President Obama to talk in personal and meaningful terms about another historic division in our national life: the way we distribute the rewards in our economy.

It is a topic as toxic as race, in its own way. And confronting it at the same level of seriousness may be the only way for this president to find his way out of his current dilemma.