Obama seeks to clarify his views on race

His speech Tuesday distanced him from his pastor's views.

from the March 19, 2008 edition

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But for whites unfamiliar with the history of the black church, she says, "I think [Wright's remarks] would at least give them pause."

Obama met Wright while working with churches as a community organizer in Chicago in the mid-1980s and joined Trinity United Church of Christ in the early 1990s. In his book “Dreams from my Father,” Obama rhapsodizes about the day he found religion while listening to Wright’s sermon on “the audacity to hope” in the face of suffering.

The Obama campaign recognized Wright as a political liability from the very day he announced his candidacy in February 2007, when it abruptly revoked an invitation to Wright to deliver the public invocation.

A flurry of news stories followed, but interest in the pastor had died down until the TV reports last week. The latest round of coverage had a new dimension in part because Obama aides had demanded that Ms. Ferraro resign as a Clinton fundraiser after her comments to a California newspaper that Obama owed his political rise to being black.

In a statement Friday to the Web newspaper The Huffington Post, Obama said he was not in the pews when Wright made "inflammatory and appalling remarks" and had not heard similar language in his conversations with Wright.

He said he "did not think it appropriate to leave the church, … because Rev. Wright was on the verge of retirement, and because of my strong links to the Trinity faith community."

Wright did not respond to an e-mail requesting comment. But in previously unpublished excerpts from an e-mail interview with the Monitor last June, he described his relationship with Obama as more intellectual sparring partner than mentor.

"I think what drew him to Trinity was the fact that I was one of the few black pastors in the late 1980's in the city of Chicago who had a seminary degree and could discuss religion, faith and public policy with him without trying to proselytize him or convince him that my views were the only right (or correct) views," Wright said in his e-mail. "I tried to make him think more than tried to tell him what to think."

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