'Outraged' Obama Breaks With Former Pastor

By RUSSELL BERMAN, Staff Reporter of the Sun
April 30, 2008

WASHINGTON — Senator Obama is making a new bid to break away from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, denouncing the latest incendiary remarks by his former pastor and signaling that their 20-year relationship may be over.

"I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw," the Democratic presidential front-runner said yesterday at a press conference he called specifically to address Rev. Wright.

Mr. Obama responded a day after Rev. Wright, in a defiant appearance at the National Press Club in Washington, criticized him while unapologetically defending his own views on race relations, black liberation theology, and a range of other policy fronts.

The former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Rev. Wright has himself been responding to a firestorm created by video clips of his sermons that have circulated widely on the Internet and have been played repeatedly on television. One snippet shows him exclaiming, "God Damn America," and another shows a sermon shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in which he says, "America's chickens are coming home to roost."

Rev. Wright on Monday said criticism of him marked "an attack on the black church," and he dismissed Mr. Obama's earlier attempts to denounce his comments as ill-informed and merely political.

The pastor also refused to back away from his previous statements comparing American war policy to terrorism and suggesting the government had used HIV/AIDS to eliminate minorities.

His re-emergence on the national stage after weeks of silence has come at a precarious time for Mr. Obama, who has lost key primaries in Ohio and Pennsylvania to Senator Clinton while struggling to capture the support of blue-collar white voters. The two will face off again in Indiana and North Carolina next week.

Mr. Obama derided Rev. Wright's performance as a "spectacle" and said the pastor had "caricatured himself."

"The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago," Mr. Obama 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."

For Mr. Obama, the remarks represent a sharp departure from just last month, when, in a major speech on race in America, he condemned some of Rev. Wright's objectionable comments but refused to dissociate from him completely.

"I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother," Mr. Obama said then of the man who performed his wedding and baptized his two children.

Yesterday, he all but severed their ties. Telling reporters he felt angered and disrespected by Rev. Wright's decision to seize the spotlight, Mr. Obama said he wanted to "make people absolutely clear that obviously whatever relationship I had with Reverend Wright has changed, as a consequence of this."

At various points during his press conference, Mr. Obama described his former pastor's comments as "destructive," "outrageous," "ridiculous," "divisive," and "appalling."

Rev. Wright's worldview, he said, "contradicts everything that I'm about and who I am."

He singled out Rev. Wright's statements on AIDS and American war policy, as well as his praise for Minister Louis Farrakhan.

Mr. Obama appeared to take particular offense at Rev. Wright's portrayal of his speech in Philadelphia. "If Reverend Wright thinks that that's political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn't know me very well," he said. "And based on his remarks yesterday, well, I may not know him as well as I thought either."