Obama Gets Tough with his Pastor
Barack Obama has had enough. This time Jeremiah Wright has gone too far. Obama came out at a press conference in North Carolina and basically tore apart his former pastor. Read below:
In his strongest terms yet, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) rejected his pastor of 20 years at a press conference in North Carolina this afternoon. Obama called Rev. Jeremiah Wright's remarks at the National Press Club yesterday a "performance" that angered him.
"I want to make absolutely clear that I do not subscribe to the views that he suggests," Obama said. "I think they are wrong, I think they are disruptive."
Obama referred to Wright's continued claims that Louis Farrakhan was one of the greatest voices of the 21st century, that the U.S. government was involved in the development of AIDS and equating U.S. military action with terrorism. Wright also suggested that Obama's recent denouncements were done solely for political reasons.
Those remarks "offend me," Obama said, "and they should be denounced and that is what I'm doing unequivocally today."
Wright's remarks, he added, "do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church. They certainly do not portray accurately my values and beliefs. If Rev. Wright thinks that's political posturing than he does not know me very well and based on what I saw yesterday, I may not know him very well."
More here.
This forceful response may get Obama out of this mess of a situation. It should send a signal to some voters that there is a big difference between Obama and Jeremiah Wright. Some will say he should have been forceful like this sooner and others will continue to criticize Obama's judgment for putting up with these type of comments in the first place. Valid points but maybe we should give Obama the benefit of the doubt here.
Look, his former Pastor basically accused Obama of being a typical pandering politician. Ouch! That is exactly the opposite of what Obama says he stands for. If I were Obama, I'd be pretty upset too. Maybe he really doesn't know Wright as well as he thought. Think about it. What kind of serious crisis have they been through together? During a crisis you know who your real friends are right? If Wright wanted to be a real friend to Obama, he wouldn't have put on that show yesterday at the National Press Club. The Bill Moyers interview would have and could have been enough. He could have stopped there. He didn't. Clearly Wright felt it was more important to defend himself and the black Church than worry about Obama's presidential campaign. Fair enough but isn't there a better way to handle it than criticizing Obama and causing a furor in front of the national media?
