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Controversial Minister
Leaves Obama Campaign
 Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., condemned racially charged
sermons by his former pastor Friday and urged Americans not to reject
his presidential campaign because of “guilt by
association.” Obama’s campaign announced that the
minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., had left its spiritual advisory
committee after videotapes of his sermons again ignited fierce debate
in news accounts and political blogs. Obama did not clarify whether
Wright volunteered to leave his African American Religious Leadership
Committee, a loose group of supporters associated with the campaign, or
whether the campaign asked him to leave.
“I think there was recognition that he’s obviously
on the verge of retirement, [that] he’s taking a sabbatatical
and that it was important for him to step out of the spotlight in this
situation,” Obama said.
Wright was the latest in a series of advisers to Obama and Sen. Hillary
Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., who have stepped aside as supporters of both
candidates trade racially charged accusations.
Obama
rejects comments
Obama spoke warmly of Wright, who retired last month as pastor of
Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Wright is a man
“I’ve known for 17 years, [who] helped bring me to
Jesus, helped bring me to church,” he said.
“I strongly condemn” Wright’s statements,
but “I would not repudiate the man,” Obama said.
“He’s been preaching for 30 years. He’s a
man who was a former Marine, a biblical scholar, someone
who’s spoken at theological schools all over the country.
“That’s the man I know,” Obama said.
“That’s the man who was the pastor of this
church.”
But Obama acknowledged that “there’s no doubt this
is going to be used as political fodder, as it has been in the
past.”
“What I hope is [that] what the American people will trust is
what I believe,” he said, that “my values, my
ideas, what I’ve spoke about in terms of bringing the country
together will override a guilt by association.”
But the sermons, at least one of which was delivered long before Wright
retired last month, revived uncomfortable questions about
Obama’s ties to the minister, whom conservative critics have
accused of advocating black separatism.
A videotape of one sermon captures Wright using a harsh racial epithet
to argue that Clinton could not understand the struggles of African
Americans.
“Barack knows what it means, living in a country and a
culture that is controlled by rich white people,” Wright said
on Christmas Day of last year. “Hillary can never know that.
Hillary ain’t never been called a [N-word]!”
In another sermon, delivered five days 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 baptized him 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.”
In his remarks on MSNBC, Obama expanded on a brief posting that was
made under his name earlier Friday afternoon 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,” the posting said, 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.”
Clinton
adviser gives Obama a pass
There was no formal reaction from the Clinton campaign, but Lanny
Davis, a senior adviser, 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, for which he
is a contributing writer.
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.
Although both candidates have disavowed them, recent exchanges between
supporters of Obama and Clinton 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.”
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.
MSNBC
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