WASHINGTON — Barack Obama angrily disowned his former pastor and friend of 20 years, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., saying Tuesday that Wright's recent comments about race, religion and the U.S. government were "divisive and destructive" and had undermined the purpose of Obama's presidential candidacy.
Appearing pained and irritated, the senator from Illinois said that Wright, who used a nationally televised speech Monday at the National Press Club to repeat some of his most incendiary comments, was "not the person that I met 20 years ago." Obama called the pastor's appearance a "spectacle" and a "performance," and said it was a "show of disrespect to me" and "an insult to what we've been trying to do in this campaign."
Some black leaders said Tuesday that they were frustrated at Wright for undertaking a publicity tour in recent days that may have harmed the chance to elect the first black president. And a number of African American church leaders expressed alarm that Wright, whose views on social issues are far to the left of most black clergy, claimed on Monday to speak for all black churches.
"I wish that Jeremiah, my friend, had kept his eye on the prize," said the Rev. Frank Madison Reid III, pastor of a large African Methodist Episcopal congregation in Baltimore who studied with Wright and has invited him regularly to preach at his church. "And the prize here for America, for all Americans, is that we can elect the first black man for the presidency."
Obama's rebuke came amid a renewed controversy over Wright that has enveloped the candidate's campaign just one week before key primary contests in Indiana and North Carolina against his Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Previously, while Obama had denounced some of Wright's views, he had refused to outright reject the pastor who officiated at his wedding and baptized his children and whom he had likened to an uncle.
"Obviously, whatever relationship I had with Rev. Wright has changed, as a consequence of this," Obama told reporters in Winston-Salem, N.C., on Tuesday, one day after the latest appearance by Wright, which has been replayed continuously on cable television. Obama's unusually strong words underscored the extent of the crisis facing his campaign as he attempts to court blue-collar white voters, who largely have rejected him in recent primaries but are considered important in the general election.
