As Barack Obama sought to dampen the renewed controversy over his former pastor by announcing three superdelegate endorsements Wednesday, Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton kept the issue alive, calling remarks by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. "offensive and outrageous."
Appearing on Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor," Clinton said she wouldn't have remained in a church with such divisive sermons. She added that it would be up to voters to decide whether the controversy would affect the presidential campaign.
Wright, in a nationally televised speech Monday at the National Press Club in Washington, repeated some of the incendiary comments from videotaped sermons that ignited the controversy in March. They included assertions that the U.S. government may have played a role in the spread of AIDS among African Americans and that the nation's foreign policy actions led to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Bill O'Reilly, host of the Fox News program on which Clinton appeared, asked the New York senator how she felt when she heard "a fellow American citizen say that kind of stuff about America."
"Well, I take offense," Clinton said. "I think it's offensive and outrageous."
But Clinton also said that she thought Obama "made his views clear, finally, that he disagreed, and I think that's what he had to do."
Clinton's comments came a day after Obama held a news conference to dissociate himself from Wright. The Illinois senator called his former pastor's National Press Club appearance a "spectacle," a "show of disrespect to me" and "an insult to what we've been trying to do" in his quest for the White House.
'Unacceptable' words
In Indianapolis on Wednesday, six days before the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, Wright came up in a voter's question at an Obama forum focusing on tax policies.
"What [Wright] said over the last few days and in some of the sermons that have been excerpted were unacceptable and weren't things that we believed in or cared about or cared to believe in," Obama replied. "What we want to do now, though, is to make sure that this doesn't continue to be a perpetual distraction."
As the uproar over Wright continued, three major national polls delivered mixed results for the two Democratic candidates.
Obama was the leader among Democrats nationally in the New York Times/CBS News poll, with a 46%-to-38% edge, and in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey, 46% to 43%. A Fox poll, however, showed Democrats preferring Clinton, 44% to 41%.
