You have to give Bill Clinton credit. Sure we think he’s self-involved. But on Wednesday the former president of the United States was campaigning for his wife in North Carolina, making appearances at Apex, Sanford, Lillington, Dunn, Hope Mills, Lumberton and Whiteville. Following a 7:45 a.m. event in Apex, he was scheduled to discuss “Solutions for America” on “the lawn in front of McSwain Extension Education and Agriculture Center.”

This does not sound like the itinerary of a person who’s incapable of relinquishing center stage. In a way, though, it’s his idea of heaven. The man is perfectly happy to go anywhere as long as he gets to talk. Harvard, McSwain Extension Center, somebody’s living room, somebody’s lawn, the checkout line at Rite Aid. Just sit him next to a human being with ears and he’s good to go.

Men with egos are, of course, the central topic this week, what with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. dominating the American conversation to an extent that even he could have not imagined in his wildest dreams. It’s getting so you can’t even have a starlet-in-crisis story without an overweening father figure lurking in the background.

This week, Miley Cyrus, the 15-year-old star of the excruciatingly popular “Hannah Montana” TV series, got into hot water for appearing in Vanity Fair clad only in a blanket. While she issued a statement saying she “never intended for any of this to happen,” it seems hard to believe one could accidentally pose for an Annie Leibovitz photo spread. Personally, I blame Miley’s father, a formerly famous singer named Billy Ray Cyrus.

Dad, who appears in his daughter’s series, also showed up in the photo spread, lounging with his child in a shot that might have seemed weirdly intimate if we had not been distracted by the blanket thing. He claims he wandered off before things got R-rated. You’d think that a truly concerned parent would have given top priority to the topless part of the proceedings, but I suspect Billy Ray was too engrossed in his role in the picture-taking to focus on anyone else’s.

We digress. The subject here was the damage that egoistic men can do to a political campaign belonging to somebody else. The Jeremiah Wright event has raised questions about Barack Obama’s presidential campaign that go beyond speculating about how aging white voters are going to react. (As an aging white voter, I would like to report that we have moved on and are now concentrating exclusively on the fate of the farm bill.)

Obviously, Obama doesn’t share Wright’s racial paranoia. But the saga does play into Hillary Clinton’s most powerful argument: that he is not seasoned enough to be elected president.

By seasoned, she actually means hardened by the soul-searing fires of humiliation and defeat. When Hillary was around Barack’s age and still in Arkansas, it’s perfectly possible that if her longtime pastor suddenly became a political embarrassment, she’d have loyally tried to distance herself without disowning him entirely.

Since then, she’s had a long string of painful lessons learned. One is that when beloved associates become political embarrassments, they tend to be much more concerned about their own reputation than yours. Many bodies under the bus later, when she tells you that she’d have dumped Rev. Wright at the first mention of chickens coming home to roost, you’d better believe it.

This sales pitch -- I know how the cruel world works -- is powerful in a political party that keeps losing elections that it thinks it deserves to win. On the other hand, young voters who have yet to have their hearts broken by a politician find it wicked depressing.

One hitch in the Clinton argument is that Hillary still has Bill, a walking encyclopedia of political near-death experiences.

She has suggested that her husband would be kept offstage, serving as a “roving ambassador” in her administration. (“On Wednesday, the former president will continue his goodwill tour of Paraguay, appearing in Limpio, Ñemby, Encarnación and Mariano Roque Alonso, where he will discuss Solutions for South America behind the ice cream cart three houses down from the bus stop.”) It would be pretty to think so, but can I see a show of hands on how many of you believe it?