Wright brings race issue back to '08 race Quote:
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Without coordinating with the Obama campaign, Wright has launched a pugnacious public-relations blitz to defend his church and explain comments that critics have called racially inflammatory and unpatriotic.
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In a talk in Washington Monday morning, Wright was by turns professorial, defiant, and flip, twice offering himself up as a candidate for vice president.
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The Illinois senator was already fending off new questions about his ability to win enough blue-collar white voters to close the protracted nomination fight with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Wright now returns to the headlines as Obama faces new tests of his bid for a postracial politics, first in Indiana on May 6 then in West Virginia and Kentucky later in the month.
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Obama has said he sharply disagrees with Wright's portrayal of American government as racist, corrupt, and murderous. But he said in his speech last month that Wright had been "like family to me," "as imperfect as he may be," and sought to put Wright's comments in the context of an older generation of African-Americans embittered by painful firsthand memories of discrimination.
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Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, had been largely silent on Wright, saying he did not believe Obama shared his former pastor's views. Last week, he asked the North Carolina GOP, unsuccessfully, to scrap the ad.
But in an apparent shift, McCain denounced Wright at a news conference in Florida Sunday. He called "beyond belief" Wright's remarks comparing the Romans of Jesus' day to the US Marines and likening America to Al Qaeda.
McCain said that Obama had made Wright fair game by telling Fox on Sunday that Wright's remarks were a "legitimate political issue."
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Wright brings race issue back to '08 race | csmonitor.com
Yes, I can understand the need for someone to defend his lifelong career and character. However, I can't understand
a black religious leader not putting this on the back burner for a few months until the smoke clears so that history could be made and a black man elected to the White House.
I wonder if there is some sort of payback going on here, that Wright was hurt that Obama didn't stick up for him more?