Jeremiah Wright

 

City Councilman and Obama supporter Charles Barron thinks Barack Obama was wrong to denounce Jeremiah Wright.  read more »

 

After speaking to reporters in Manhattan about the protests he’s organizing in response to the Sean Bell verdict, Al Sharpton was asked about a separate issue: Barack Obama’s denunciation of Jeremiah Wright.

Sharpton, a politician and reverend, said, “What Barack Obama did was a profile in courage,” and said it demonstrated the kind of leadership “I not only respect, but support.”

This, a day after Sharpton blasted Obama for "grandstand[ing] in front of white people." Go figure.

As the Rev. Jeremiah Wright gleefully tours the airwaves, inflicting severe political damage with almost every utterance, he is proving that racism isn’t the only obstacle to a black president. That historic prize is almost within the grasp of one of the most talented politicians America has ever seen. Yet what seems most likely to frustrate Senator Barack Obama now is not white prejudice but the frivolity, egotism and pettiness of those who should be his most serious and dedicated supporters.

To criticize Mr. Wright is not to reject the black church, the speaking styles of black preachers, the aspirations of black children or the rhythms and tonalities of black music, as he seemed to suggest in his address to the N.A.A.C.P. last weekend. To reject his ideas about the origins of AIDS or the causes of 9/11 is not, as he puts it, to confuse “different” with “deficient.”  read more »

New York State Senator and Obama supporter Bill Perkins, who is partial to sports metaphors, likened Barack Obama's remarks distancing himself from Reverend Jeremiah Wright today to a marathon runner overcoming a bad cramp.

"Do you want that cramp? No." said Perkins, "Are you ready to deal with the cramp? Yes."  

Obama, he said, was not the only candidate in the race suffering from sudden and painful spasms.  read more »

Representative Gregory Meeks of New York, a Hillary Clinton supporter, thinks that Barack Obama's disavowal of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright this afternoon was mostly about politics.  read more »

Barack Obama had a Sister Souljah moment of sorts today.

Obama's renunciation of Wright today in Winston-Salem had an almost solemn tone to it.

"The person that I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago," he said. "His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate, and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church."  read more »

Somewhere, Barack Obama's aides are having a nervous morning.

Speaking at the National Press Club (but in front of what sounded on the CNN feed very much like an audience of non-journalist supporters), Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, just offered his thoughts on the black church and his role in the Democratic nominating process.

At one point he took a question asking whether he stood by his comments comparing the United States to the Romans who oppressed Jesus Christ.

"Yes, I can compare them," he said. "We have troops stationed all over the world."  read more »

 

Here's video of Hillary Clinton talking about Jeremiah Wright during the interview she gave to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which was published yesterday. “If I had sat there for 20 years I think you all would have a lot to say,” she says.

The Clinton campaign says it has no comment on the remarks Clinton fund-raiser Niall O'Dowd made to an interviewer on Irish radio comparing Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, to white supremacist David Duke.

O'Dowd said "I think the issue that the Clinton campaign has seized on is that Barack Obama, you know, never once raised his voice to his pastor and said, `I think your language is quite extreme here, and I think you language is probably wrong.' Because let's turn this around. If this was David Duke and he was preaching on behalf of, and Hillary Clinton was in the pew, there would be outrage about this. And there can't be this double standard. Barack Obama has used race where it suited him, but when it doesn't suit him he backs away from it."

O'Dowd's comments surfaced on a day when Clinton herself answered a question about what she would have done in Obama's place, by saying of Wright, "He would not have been my pastor." She added, "We don't have a choice when it comes to our relatives. We have a choice when it comes to our pastors and the churches we attend."

She hasn't said yet whether she has brought up the issue of Obama's relationship with Wright in conversations with superdelegates.  read more »

Earlier today the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review published an interview with Hillary Clinton in which she said of Barack Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright:

"He would not have been my pastor," Clinton said.  read more »

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We’re about to find out how serious America really is about having a national conversation on race.

On Tuesday, Barack Obama offered perhaps the most thoughtful and sophisticated oration on race ever delivered by an American politician, a remarkable address in which he—the son of a white Kansan and a native Kenyan—acknowledged the resentments and fears that define both sides of America’s racial divide and, essentially, warned of the perils of the current, artificial national dialogue that tackles “race only as a spectacle.”  read more »

Addressing incendiary remarks by his former pastor, Barack Obama gave a major address on race in America today in which he refused to disown the reverend, and instead used him as a springboard to make one of the most nuanced speeches about race in any American election.

The speech addressed a matter that may have represented the most grave threat yet to his appeal, but it was also a tacit rebuke of Hillary Clinton's criticism that he represented "just talk." Honest talk, in terms of race, Obama seemed to suggest, was just what was necessary to move the country forward.

In the speech, given at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Obama rejected the divisive comments of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but also acknowledged and challenged the black community's notion of an immutable institutional racism in America. But somewhat counterintuitively, Obama embraced Wright as an example of the America tinged by years of racial division, but which he argued could be healed. Referring to his own unusual biography – the son of a white Kansas woman and black African man – he called on white Americans to recognize the plight of black Americans as a step towards the goal of working toward a national racial unity.  read more »