Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) speaks during a news conference at Wilmington Airport in Wilmington, N.C., April 28, 2008.

 Sen. Barack Obama wants everyone to know that he is not the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and the talkative Rev. Wright does not speak for him.

On a day when his longtime pastor at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ seemed to pop up every five minutes in the mainstream media and the blogosphere, Obama emphasized the distance between them.

“I have said before and I will repeat again that some of the comments that Rev. Wright have made offend me and I understand why they’ve offended the American people,” Obama said in a brief airport tarmac press conference in Wilmington, N.C.

“He does not speak for me,” Obama said. “He does not speak for the campaign. He may make statements in the future that don’t reflect my values or concerns.”

Obama was asked if he felt betrayed by Wright, who played a significant role in Obama’s spiritual life for 20 years, performed his wedding and inspired the title of Obama’s most recent book, “The Audacity of Hope.”

“I just want to emphasize that this is my former pastor,” Obama said. “Any of the statements that he’s made both to trigger this controversy and that he’s made over the last several days are not statements that I’ve heard him make previously. They don’t represent my views. And they don’t represent what this campaign’s about.”

Obama did not mention Wright at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, where he spoke and took questions for about 80 minutes. In response to a question about his faith Obama spoke at length, but did not use it as an opening to say yet more about Wright.

No one in the enthusiastic 5,000-person crowd asked him about the controversy, nor did anyone tonight among 1,900 people packed into a high school gym in Wilson. Obama is due to lead a rally later in Chapel Hill inside the Dean Smith Center, better known as the Dean Dome, during his third and final event of the day.

Focusing on the crucial days before the May 6 primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, Obama seemed determined to wrench his campaign back to the basic messages that propelled him to a strong lead in pledged delegates. He spoke of moving away from “distortions and distractions.”

And he got a standing ovation after telling the crowd that he was determined to move beyond a rough stretch of the campaign that he described as overly negative, not to mention injurious to the health of his candidacy.

“Having politicians bickering back and forth doesn’t help you,” Obama said. “Having them worrying about superdelegates doesn’t help you. This election is not about me. It’s not about Senator Clinton. It’s not about John McCain. It’s about you. It’s about your struggles, your hopes and dreams.”

The crowd roared.

Obama said that his campaign in recent weeks got “sucked into this whole negative thing. People throw elbows at you. You start feeling like, ‘Oh, I got to throw an elbow back,’” Obama said. “I told this to my team, that we are starting to sound like other folks. We’re starting to run the same negative stuff and it shows that none of us are immune from this kind of politics.”

He added, “For the next nine days, between now and May 6, and the next nine months between now and November, and the next nine years” — and here he was interrupted by cheers — “I am going to spend all my time talking about you.”

On the tarmac in Wilmington, Obama was asked how he intends to move beyond Wright, with all the attention Wright is getting from the media, as well as from Clinton and presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain.

“What I think is interesting is none of the voters I talk to ask about it,” Obama said. “Now, there may be people who are troubled about it and are being polite in not asking me about it. But that’s not what I hear from the voters. What I’m hearing is concerns about gas prices. I’m hearing from people concerned about their jobs being shifted overseas.”

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WashingtonPost.com

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/04/28/obama_on_wright_he_does_not_sp.html

The media still won’t admit that Barack Obama has already won the nomination. Hillary Clinton’s single-digit victory in the Keystone State was not enough to change the math, but now that she has “momentum” the race has moved to North Carolina and Indiana on May 6th. Obama is well ahead in North Carolina, and the media should define his victory in the largest state left as resolving the contest. Instead, pundits are focusing on the smaller Hoosier State, arguing that Obama must win to “prove” he can secure the votes of white working-class voters. But the media is paying no attention to Clinton’s inability to win African-American or “creative class” voters, and her huge deficit to Obama in every Southern state but Florida. Nor do they acknowledge that Obama did better among the white working class in Pennsylvania than in Ohio, and that his weakness is limited to white working-class Catholics. Obama does not have to win Indiana to “prove” anything, as his expected victory in North Carolina will cement his lead in both delegates and the popular vote.

After Clinton won Pennsylvania by nine points (early returns had her ahead by 10 points, leading to false claims that it was a “double-digit victory”), her campaign has clung to the myth that the tide is turning. But that’s simply not true. “It’s like a football or basketball game,” said talk show host Cenk Uygur. “If you’re already down 45-10 in the fourth quarter, and you get momentum by scoring ten more points, it doesn’t matter because you’re still going to lose. Hillary Clinton is high-stepping after scoring a touchdown – when she’s still down by 28 points.”

And the rest of the calendar won’t be enough for her to catch up. The largest state left is North Carolina (115 pledged delegates.) With its large African-American population and high number of “creative class” workers in the Research Triangle, Obama should win by a good margin. Even after Pennsylvania, Obama is still ahead by 153 pledged delegates – and more super-delegate endorsements have helped him narrow the gap with Clinton in that category, making it even less likely that they will overturn the will of the people.

But because Clinton won’t give up her negative campaign, the media has to keep the race going. So they’ve settled on Indiana, which like North Carolina has a primary on May 6th – and where polls show the race in a statistical dead heat. Obama, they claim, is “weak” among white working-class voters. If he loses Indiana (just like he lost Ohio and Pennsylvania), it will somehow reveal a fatal flaw in his campaign with Rustbelt voters that he’ll need to win over in the general election.

Never do they acknowledge the in-roads that Obama made with Clinton’s base (old, white working-class voters) between the Ohio primary on March 4th and Pennsylvania on April 22nd. He gained 10 points among voters over sixty, five points with white males, four points among voters making less than $50,000 a year, and held steady among those without a college degree. Consider that during that time period, Obama got trashed over his association with Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers – and was called an elitist for saying that “bitter” working-class voters “cling to guns and religion.”

During the last six weeks, we were repeatedly told that Obama was “unelectable” because these Joe Six-Pack types would defect to John McCain. After a grueling period of attack after negative attack, the Clinton campaign now wants us to believe that he can’t withstand the right-wing noise machine – even though evidence of a blowback from the Pennsylvania results is minimal.

But Obama doesn’t really have a “white working-class” problem. The main obstacle his campaign now faces is that working-class Catholics are reluctant to vote for an African-American candidate. This explains why Obama did so poorly in Massachusetts despite a high-profile endorsement from Ted Kennedy, lost Rhode Island by a wide-margin – and why Pennsylvania’s large Catholic population meant that he faced enormous odds in the Keystone State.

Even in Wisconsin, where Obama won by 17 points and cut into Clinton’s base so far that it looked like her coalition was crumbling, he only tied her among Catholic voters.

And here’s the good news for Obama about Indiana: Protestants outnumber Catholics there by a 2:1 margin, and the state has a sizable chunk of evangelicals. Obama lost Protestants in Ohio, but he won them in Pennsylvania – which indicates that this bloc of working-class voters can be swayed to support his campaign. Evangelical Christians who vote in the Democratic primary have always supported Obama over Clinton, as evidenced by CNN exit polls. After comparing religious demographics with various primary states, I am now convinced that Indiana most resembles Missouri – which Obama barely won.

Does this mean that Obama will win the Indiana primary? Of course not. The result will be close, and Clinton may still eke out a small victory – which the media will use as a basis for still keeping her in the race. But in the long run, it doesn’t really matter – because Obama has amassed such a sizable delegate lead that she simply cannot catch up. It is time for everyone to recognize that the race is truly over.

Obama will be the nominee, and it makes no sense why the race has to come down to the Indiana primary. It’s time for the media to acknowledge that.

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BeyondChron.com 

http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Media_Defines_Indiana_Not_North_Carolina_as_Key_to_May_6_Primaries_5610.html

The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. has wriggled out from under sound bites and screen-grab loops to put himself into context in that most American of ways: on television.

And he went deep into context — a rich, stem-winding brew of black history, Scripture, hallelujahs and hermeneutics. Mr. Wright, Senator Barack Obama’s former pastor, was cocky, defiant, declamatory, inflammatory and mischievous, but most of all, he was all over the place, performing a television triathlon of interview, lecture and live news conference that pushed Mr. Obama aside and placed himself front and center in the presidential election campaign.

His rehabilitation tour has done no favors to the Obama campaign, which has expressed distress over Mr. Wright’s timing and intemperance. “He does not speak for me; he does not speak for the campaign,” Mr. Obama said Monday.

But Mr. Wright’s monomania over the last three days has helped prove the point Mr. Obama made about his former pastor last month in his speech on race, in which he described Mr. Wright as “imperfect” but having also been “like family to me.” Mr. Wright revealed himself to be the compelling but slightly wacky uncle who unsettles strangers but really just craves attention.

Viewers who had seen the Chicago preacher only in brief cable news clips or campaign attack ads finally saw the unexpurgated version, and it was an illuminating display.

Followers of Fox News may have been appalled by the sound bites, but so were members of Mr. Wright’s congregation, including Mr. Obama, who complained that the inflammatory snippets were reductive and unfair.

Now it turns out that Mr. Wright doesn’t hate America, he loves the sound of his own voice. He is not out of touch with the American culture, he is the avatar of the American celebrity principle: he grabbed his 30-second spots of infamy and turned them into 15 minutes of fame.

Cable news commentators have focused on the damage the spectacle inflicted on the embattled Obama campaign. And while Mr. Wright’s behavior may not have been politic for Mr. Obama, it was politics as usual for the television age. In at least one way, Mr. Wright’s star turn may have helped defuse his importance in the long run. The pastor who was thrust upon the public consciousness as a caricature of the angry black man emerged after an exhaustive series of performances as a more familiar television persona: a voluble, vain and erudite entertainer, a born televangelist who quotes Ralph Ellison as well as the Bible and mixes highfalutin academic trope with salty street talk.

At a press conference on Monday, Mr. Wright said that his critics were not attacking him, they were attacking African-American culture. “In our community we have something called ‘playing the dozens,’ ” he said with a grin, referring to trash talk competitions that are also known as “yo mama” fights. “If you think I’m going to let you talk about my mama, and her religious tradition,” he said, pausing a beat, “you got another thing coming.”

Mr. Wright’s demystification process began on PBS on Friday. Bill Moyers, the host who knows and obviously admires Mr. Wright, gave the pastor every chance to elaborate on his bona fides, including two years in the Marine Corps and four as a Navy cardiopulmonary technician. Mr. Moyers showed old footage of Mr. Wright in surgical scrubs monitoring President Lyndon B. Johnson’s heart after his gall bladder surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital in 1965. (Mr. Moyers, who was then the White House press secretary, stood behind Mr. Wright.)

He showed Mr. Wright’s service to his community throughout the years — tutoring programs, women’s groups, H.I.V. ministries. And he also gave Mr. Wright a chance to deconstruct the fiery sermon that seemed to blame America for the Sept. 11 attacks and clarify that he was quoting a former ambassador and intended to condemn the American government, not the nation itself. Mostly, he gave his guest a chance to show his softer side: in a dark suit and gray tie, Mr. Wright was courtly, genial, and something of an egghead, tossing out academic citations, literary references and words like “hermeneutics.”

He pumped up the volume on Sunday in his keynote address to the N.A.A.C.P. in Detroit, delivering a thundering lecture about cultural differences and historical biases that sought to explain that his more controversial remarks were taken the wrong way by white viewers who are unfamiliar with the traditions of the African-American church.

“I come from a religious tradition where we shout in the sanctuary and march in the picket line,” he said. “Different does not mean deficient.” He lectured on differences in music, learning styles (left brain vs. right brain), and he mimicked President John F. Kennedy’s Boston accent and also mocked Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s speech. “Nobody says to a Kennedy, ‘You speak bad English,’ ” he said. “Only to a black child was that said.”

By the time he took the stage on Monday at the National Press Club in Washington, Mr. Wright was on a tear, insisting that “this is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright, this has nothing to do with Barack Obama, this is an attack on the black church.” He delivered a rambling disquisition on race, African tradition and theology, and he was clearly enjoying himself, frowning in concentration as the moderator read written questions from reporters, then stepping up to the lectern with feisty rejoinders and snappy retorts, looking as pleased with his replies as a contestant in a high school spelling bee who has just correctly spelled the final word.

While MSNBC was waiting to go live to the event, an anchor asked Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, why the campaign had allowed Mr. Wright to refocus attention upon himself. “He is doing his own thing,” Mr. Axelrod said wearily by telephone. “There’s not a thing we can do about it.”

By the time Mr. Wright had finished speaking, he had proved Mr. Axelrod’s point. And also one made by Chuck Todd, the NBC political director who summed up Mr. Wright’s apologia by paraphrasing a Carly Simon song: “You’re so vain, I bet you think this campaign is about you.”

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NYTimes.com 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/us/politics/29watc.html?ref=television