Obama struggles to downplay fiery minister

Former pastor of Chicago church again creates headache for Democrat

Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign announced Friday that his former pastor had left the campaign’s spiritual advisory committee after the pastor’s inflammatory sermons ignited fierce debate in news accounts and political blogs.

The campaign said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., who Obama has said brought him to Christianity, was “no longer serving” on Obama’s African American Religious Leadership Committee, a loose group of supporters associated with the campaign, NBC’s Mark Murray reported.

It was not clear whether Wright volunteered to leave the committee as controversy swirled over his sermons or whether the campaign asked him to leave. Wright was the latest in a series of advisers to Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton who have stepped aside as supporters of both candidates trade racially charged accusations.

A videotape of one sermon captures Wright thunderously denouncing the United States shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In another, Wright uses a harsh racial epithet to argue that Clinton could not understand the struggles of African Americans.

The sermons, at least one of which was delivered long before Wright retired last month from Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, revived questions about Obama’s ties to the minister, whom conservative critics have accused of supporting black separatism.

“Barack knows what it means, living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people,” Wright says in one of the fiery sermons, delivered Christmas Day. “Hillary can never know that. Hillary ain’t never been called a [N-word]!”

In another sermon, apparently delivered not long after the 9/11 attacks, Wright seems to imply that the United States had brought the terrorist violence on itself.

“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York, and we never batted an eye,” Wright says. “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is brought right back in our own front yards.”

In a later sermon, Wright revisits the theme, declaring: “No, no, no, not God bless America — God damn America!"

Obama took the title of his 2006 autobiography, “The Audacity of Hope,” from a sermon by Wright, who also baptized the presidential candidate and officiated at his wedding. He has called Wright “a sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible.”

Obama rejects comments
The firestorm was addressed by the candidate Friday afternoon in a posting under his name on the Huffington Post Web site.

“The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation,” Obama wrote, adding that over the years, “Rev. Wright preached the gospel of Jesus, a gospel on which I base my life.

“In other words, he has never been my political advisor; he's been my pastor. And the sermons I heard him preach always related to our obligation to love God and one another, to work on behalf of the poor, and to seek justice at every turn.”

Obama wrote that he had known of similar statements by Wright over the years, which he strongly condemned. He wrote that he chose to remain in the church because “Rev. Wright was on the verge of retirement, and because of my strong links to the Trinity faith community.”

There was no official reaction from Clinton, but Lanny Davis, a senior adviser to the campaign, said he took Obama at his word.

“I give Senator Obama completely — completely — the benefit of the doubt that he has nothing to do with this bigotry that’s being spewed forth by this man,” Davis said on MSNBC’s “Tucker.” “For me, that’s all he has to say.

“I think we should stop this guilt by association thing because some of our supporters say stupid things,” Davis said.

But the videos created a firestorm among political observers and commentators.

“Mr. Obama obviously would not choose to belong to Mr. Wright’s church and seek his advice unless he agreed with at least some of his views,” Wall Street Journal columnist Ron Kessler, publisher of the conservative Web site NewsMax.com, wrote Friday.

Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor of the Web site of the conservative magazine National Review, wrote Friday that “now we know he’s contributed money to, voluntarily listened to, and publicly defended a cleric who peddles racial warfare.”

Others saw an attempt to "smear" Obama.

“How come righteous Republicans are rarely asked about the views of their spiritual advisers? Or why wasn’t George W. Bush (and the presidents preceding him) forced to distance himself from the anti-semitic comments of Billy Graham?” Ari Berman wrote Friday on the Web site of the liberal magazine The Nation.

Why are sermons an issue now?
The videotapes of Wright’s sermons have long been available for sale on the church’s Web site, raising questions about why they suddenly became an issue again late Thursday, NBC’s Ron Allen reported.

Recent exchanges between supporters of Obama and Clinton that have focused on themes of race and sex.

Geraldine Ferraro, the Democrats’ 1984 vice presidential nominee, resigned as an adviser to Clinton’s campaign Wednesday after she was quoted last week in a California newspaper suggesting that Obama owed his popularity to his race.

“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” she said, according to the Daily Breeze of Torrance. “And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position.”

Such attacks have been going back and forth for several weeks, even as they have been disavowed by the candidates themselves.

Last week, Obama’s foreign policy adviser, Samantha Power, a public policy professor at Harvard University, stepped down from the campaign after she was quoted in an interview with a Scottish newspaper calling Clinton a “monster [who] is stooping to anything.”

“You just look at her and think, ‘Ergh,’” Power said, according to The Scotsman.

Last month, Adelfa Callejo, a longtime Latino activist in Texas who supports Clinton, suggested that Latino voters would never accept Obama because of his race. “They never really supported us, and there’s a lot of hard feelings about that,” Callejo said.

And after Obama won the South Carolina primary, Clinton’s husband, the former president, dismissed the significance of his victory by saying it was to be expected because “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice.”

Advisers said Obama and Clinton were distressed by the exchanges and had agreed in a brief conversation on the Senate floor Thursday to work together to put a stop to them.

“They approached one another and spoke about how supporters for both campaigns have said things they reject,” said Phil Singer, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign. “They agreed that the contrasts between their respective records, qualifications and issues should be what drives this campaign, and nothing else.”

The Associated Press reported that an adviser to Obama, speaking on condition of anonymity, gave a similar account of the conversation.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23634881/

    Presidential hopeful Barack Obama's image as the "great uniter" had a lot of it's luster taken away by the divisive rhetoric of one of his long time spiritual mentors, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Twenty years is along time to get to know someone and for Senator Obama to say he was unaware that his Pastor held such radical and inflammatory views seems incredulous, at least to me. Senator Obama constantly touts his "good judgement" as his premier qualification to be President. Hilary Clinton we all know. What you see is what you get. The only thing we really know about Barack Obama is that he is a dynamic speaker and political campaigner. We really can't afford to deal with unknowns in "08. Because of the pressing problems facing America today, we need to "go with what we know", Hilary C-l-i-n-t-o-n!

tags: barack obama  hilary clinton  2008  2008 elections  us  president  power  democrats  takebackamerica  

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