Declaring “that’s enough,” Barack Obama on Tuesday denounced the latest “rants” of the
Rev. Jeremiah Wright as his campaign struggled to contain the political damage caused by his former pastor.
Obama, looking grim and speaking in stern tones, said he was “appalled” by Wright’s combative appearance at the National Press Club.
“I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw yesterday,” Obama said at a news conference in Salem, N.C. “His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate.”
It was a much stronger indictment of Wright than Obama delivered last month, when the Democrat tried to strike a balance between scolding and defending the minister who once exhorted his flock, “God damn America!”
“I gave him the benefit of the doubt in my speech in Philadelphia,” Obama said. “But when he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the U.S. government somehow being involved in AIDS, when he suggests that Minister [Louis] Farrakhan somehow represents one of the greatest voices of the 20th and 21st centuries, when he equates the United States’wartime efforts with terrorism, then there are no excuses.
“They offend me,” Obama said. “They rightly offend all Americans. And they should be denounced. And that’s what I’m doing very clearly and unequivocally here today.”
Obama characterized Wright as a narcissist who had “caricatured himself” at the Press Club, causing “great damage” to their 20-year-relationship. The candidate expressed particular outrage at Wright’s explanation that Obama “had to distance himself because he’s a politician.”
“At a certain point, if what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that’s enough,” Obama said. “That’s a show of disrespect to me.”
For the first time, Obama seemed to entertain the possibility of leaving Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago “because this has become such a spectacle. And when I go to church, it’s not for spectacle. It’s to pray.”
Obama declined to speculate on how the controversy might affect the primary elections next week in North Carolina and Indiana.
“We’ve got elections in four or five days, so we’ll find out what effect it has,” he said.
Obama said he has not spoken with Wright recently and did not speak with him before the Philadelphia speech because the preacher “was on a cruise.”
