(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.

Here's another sure sign we're in an era of change in Washington: People are taking the filibuster seriously again.

The Senate itself was created 220 years ago to resist and temper change, and it has evolved an arsenal it can deploy to that end. But no weapon has been more colorful -- or more effective -- than simply talking change to death.

Whenever there is a strong tide of political sentiment running, be it conservative or liberal, the party feeling pressured falls back on its last line of defense: the Senate filibuster. The current climate in Washington is no exception.

Needless to say, the party repairing to the ramparts these days is the GOP. In the past two election cycles, Republicans have lost the White House and majority control of both chambers of Congress. Their last chance to slow or stop the making of new laws -- lots of new laws -- is to threaten a filibuster in the Senate, forcing a three-fifths majority of 60 to cut off debate and proceed to a final vote.

Note the emphasis on the word "threaten" here. Contemporary filibusters are not actual but virtual. The resisting senators simply indicate an inclination to extend debate, and the signal is lost on no one. They do not even make this threat against the measure itself (a bill, a nomination, whatever). They make it against the all-important "motion to proceed" that precedes formal consideration.

This fine point of procedure allows a Senate rear guard to prevent a given measure from reaching the floor. The point may once have been to air out the issues. Today the filibuster may be entirely silent. Its intent is merely to wear down the sponsors until they withdraw the measure in frustration or Congress adjourns (whichever comes first).

Notified of a looming filibuster threat, the Senate majority leader files a petition for cloture, meaning a vote on cutting off debate. If the leader has 60 votes to support that motion, a time limit is set on debate and the measure itself eventually comes to the floor for formal consideration and a vote. At that point, the final vote holds no suspense. If you've got 60 votes for cloture, you've surely got a bare majority of 51 for passage.

So the real vote is the vote for cloture, whenever the threat of a filibuster is invoked.

In the old days, such threats were rare. Members understood that a filibuster meant holding the floor for hours at a time -- sometimes around the clock -- to prevent a vote. The idealization was Jimmy Stewart talking himself hoarse in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a 1939 movie about a fantasy character in a fantasy Washington. The reality was more like Strom Thurmond, battling a civil rights bill in 1957, dehydrating in the Senate gym so he could hold the floor for 20 hours without a potty break.

For most of our history, the rules of the filibuster required practitioners to perform the act in public. This meant reaping the appropriate degree of public opprobrium. But in the age of C-SPAN the indignities of the filibuster moved Senate leaders to take it offstage. It is now cloaked in procedural jargon and passed off as business as usual.

The bygone era of all-night speeches and members sleeping on cots in the hallways has been all but forgotten. And in that process, something of the risk of the filibuster as a tactic has been lost.

In the real world, it has always been understood that any filibuster was a power struggle in which the force of the majority could be neutralized by a determined minority. Senators reserved it for use on a single issue or two of paramount importance to their state. The classic example was the phalanx of Southern senators like Thurmond who lined up in the 1950s and 1960s to filibuster against civil rights for African-Americans in their home states.

Those battles in particular gave the "F"-word a bad connotation. So in the post-Watergate reform era of the mid-1970s, the Senate lowered the threshold for cloture from two-thirds (67) to three-fifths (60). This was a reform intended to weaken the filibuster as a weapon, but in the end it has had unintended consequences that in some ways made the filibuster more pervasive than ever.

That is because, in the years that followed, senators stopped relating to the filibuster as a nuclear weapon to be used only in extreme circumstances. Instead, the threat of a filibuster became a kind of personal sidearm, worn at all times and brandished at the slightest provocation.

Moreover, the controversy over the filibuster itself was muted. The practitioners of the filibuster were no longer required to perform the act in public and reap the appropriate degree of public scorn. That meant it could be used in comparative obscurity, with relative impunity. It was just another technique, another tradition. Making it virtual made it easier to defend it as virtuous.

So, what if the Senate were to rescind the "silent filibuster" and simply require those who wish to have "extended debate" to have it? Why not make them do it for real?

What the public would see, under the unblinking eye of C-SPAN, would be the true spectacle of a handful of senators defying the will of the majority.

What effect would that have had on the struggle over a stimulus package? What effect would it have on the next showdown, be it over health care or the seating of Al Franken as winner of the Senate race (and recount) in Minnesota?

The Senate GOP under leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has indicated it is willing to enforce the 60-vote threshold for virtually any issue that any of its members deem worthy. That could be quite a list, potentially including every important fiscal and nonfiscal piece of legislation this year and next.

That may be an enormously effective GOP firewall against an Obama-led makeover of the national economy (and the federal power structure that regulates it). It may also be a prescription for another GOP disaster in 2010 -- the kind of disastrous mispositioning that doomed the party to decades of minority status 75 years ago.

Conservatives in the 1930s always assumed the country was with them, outraged whenever Franklin D. Roosevelt overreached. But they had to keep ordering successive helpings of crow as their losses continued through four straight election cycles (from 1930 through 1936).

Conservatives are betting it will be different this time. And one reason they may be right is that their opposition to the will of the majority can be brought to bear effectively in threatened filibusters they never have to act out for real.

If they did, they might be far less willing to do it.

This week, it's health care, with President Obama staging another "White House summit" to kick-start his latest drive to reorder a fundamental element of American life.

One day earlier, he unveiled a massive new widget designed to manage all the contracts the U.S. government signs with businesses. Projected savings: $40 billion. How well will it do? No way to know until you fire it up.

In the previous week, Obama held a "fiscal responsibility" summit, wowed a joint session of Congress with tales of dire straits and high hopes, and wheeled out a new federal budget one-third larger than any before it. And to round out the week, he set a date for ending the six-year-old U.S. combat mission in Iraq (getting major ups from an audience of Marines).

In its earliest days, the fledgling Obama administration had tackled the banking crisis and the home mortgage structure and served notice it was prepared to go to great lengths to save the auto industry and bring the financial markets back under regulatory control.

Few can doubt that the weeks ahead will bring still more summits -- on energy and the environment, for example, and other topics -- closely followed by major makeover plans for federal policy in both arenas.

Have mercy! We're still not even halfway to that First 100 Days milestone that's so dear to us in the media.

Not that the Oval Office dynamo shows any signs of slowing down. He has not yet begun to fight on many fronts, and these days nearly every front seems to be spoiling for a fight.

As a result, the man and his minions seem afflicted at times with AADD: adult attention deficit disorder. At a minimum, the new crew would seem well advised to pace itself. Even those who admire the energy and ambition of the new administration have to stop and ask whether this is all too much, too soon.

For those who reflect further, the question soon becomes one of cost. Can all these rescues be done as the economy weakens dramatically? Are we burdening ourselves and future generations with debts that will come back to beggar us?

And for the more immediate present, is this any way to accomplish such a historically ambitious agenda?

Most of us would lean toward a more conventional approach. Tackle the most pressing problems first -- the credit system, the banks and the home mortgages that dragged them both down. Then perhaps more time could be devoted to a tax-cutting, job-creating stimulus plan and a budget that propped up demand while the consumer took a breather.

Beyond that, there could be time to devise new regulatory schemes, new methods of federal procurement, a new war policy and a plan for Middle East peace. You could study the health care system, and the energy-environment conundrum, and learn a lot about both over the course of a year or two. Blue-ribbon commissions could convene, organize, hire staff and issue reports.

One thing at a time, all in good time. Regular order. Slow and steady wins the race.

But that would not be the Obama Way, or more precisely the New Obama Way.

During the campaign we called him "No Drama Obama" -- the picture of cool, running on his own timetable and refusing to be rushed or thrown off stride. He often seemed to have all the time in the world.

But once the election was over, and especially since Inauguration Day, the same 47-year-old has been moving at the political equivalent of the speed of light. Now he seems to have not a moment to lose. Deadlines close in from all directions. It is as though he can solve no problem unless he moves to solve them all at once.

Solve the economy first? No, says Peter Orszag, the new budget director and another of the Obama wunderkinder. The single biggest obstacle to restarting the economy is the cost of health care, says he, and that means you can't do the one without the other.

The crises cohere, like sections of a Rubik's cube, interlocking and defying solution. Except that ultimately the solution depends on ingenious coordination of all the sections -- none of which can be neglected.

No, you cannot spend the same dollars more than once. But the dollars you spend on saving energy and improving the environment can also create jobs and contribute to lower health costs -- all at the same time.

That kind of synergy may still be more a dream than a formula, but it is a dream the Obama administration is counting on. And it may be our best national hope for the years ahead.

There is an old adage that if you want a job done you should give it to the busiest person available. Busy people tend to be more task-oriented, more efficient and effective. They invite responsibility because they respond to it. People with little to do and time on their hands may in fact have all they can handle.

Right now this country has committed itself to testing the wisdom of that adage. And a great deal rides on the outcome.