Barack Obama on Monday once again distanced himself from his retired pastor, Jeremiah Wright, as the reverend grabbed the spotlight for the fourth day in a row by suggesting the furor around his controversial remarks is an attack on black churches in America.

Plagued by the ongoing uproar regarding Wright, Obama said Wright does not represent his views or vice versa.

“I have said before and I will repeat again that what some of the comments that Reverend Wright have made offend me and I understand why they’ve offended the American people,’ Obama told reporters while traveling in Wilmington, N.C. “He does not speak for me. He does not speak for the campaign and so he may make statements in the future that don’t reflect my values or concerns.”

Obama has been trying to get out from under the weight of Wright, an increasingly heavy burden for the Democratic presidential candidate since snippets of his sermons were released all over the Internet last month. Many of the sound bites by the former pastor at the Chicago church where Obama is a member have him cursing the United States as racist and terrorist, and suggesting that the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks were retribution for immoral policies.

For days, Wright has been on something of a speaking tour, starting with a PBS interview on Friday and an NAACP dinner over the weekend. On Monday, Wright appeared at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., but rather than trying to dampen the firestorm, the former Vietnam veteran and son of a middle class family from Philadelphia added fuel to the flames.

“God doesn’t bless everything,” Wright responded when asked if he was apologetic for suggesting the U.S. should be damned. “God condemns something — and d-e-m-n, ‘demn,’ is where we get the word ‘damn.’ God damns some practices.”

Among some of his more provocative responses, Wright also told the assembled media in a raucous morning appearance that:

– American soldiers in Iraq died “over a lie” and the war is “unjust.”

– He is perhaps more patriotic than Vice President Dick Cheney: “I served six years in the military. Does that make me patriotic? How many years did Cheney serve?”

– He does not take back his comments after Sept. 11 that “chickens have come home to roost.”

“Jesus said do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you. Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic, divisive principles,” he said.

Asked about his relationship with Wright, Obama said late Monday that his own 20 years of service and the values he discusses on the campaign trail should have more impact than “folks in my past like Reverend Wright.”

“I think certainly what the last three days indicate is that we’re not coordinating with him,” Obama said with a brief laugh. “He’s obviously free to speak his mind, but I just want to emphasize he is my former pastor. Many of the statements he made both to trigger this initial controversy, and that he’s made over the last couple days are not statements that I heard him make previously. They don’t represent my views and they don’t represent what this campaign is about. But he’s obviously free to make those statements.”

Wright also said that Obama isn’t off the hook politically just because they know each other.

“I said to Barack Obama last year, ‘If you get elected November the 5th, I’m coming after you, because you’ll be representing a government whose policies grind under people.’ All right? It’s about policy, not the American people.”

Asked if he was disappointed that Obama put distance between himself and Wright, Wright said: “He didn’t distance himself. He had to distance himself, because he’s a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American. He said I didn’t offer any words of hope. How would he know? He never heard the rest of the sermon. You never heard it.”

But as Obama tries to add distance between the two, the candidate’s opponents have been slow to take advantage. Hillary Clinton, when asked about Obama and Wright, criticized Obama’s continued attendance at Wright’s church but also GOP efforts to inject Wright into the political dialogue.

“I have said that that was a personal decision of his. I answered one question about it that made it clear I would not have stayed in that church under those circumstances. but I regret the efforts by the Republicans to politicize this matter,” she said.

McCain has tried to keep his distance from the Wright controversy, but many Republicans have been dissatisfied by McCain’s passivity. They peppered him with questions while he pushed his health care reform plans in the battleground state of Florida.”I’ve said again and again I do not believe Senator Obama shares Reverend Wright’s extremist views, which he has stated whether it be the United States Marine Corps or the flag or what,” McCain said, referencing a sermon by Wright five years ago that was drudged up over the weekend.

“We cannot see how what we are doing is the same thing that Al Qaeda is doing under a different color flag, calling on the name of a different God to sanction and approve our murder,” Wright said in the April 13, 2003, sermon. “Remember it was soldiers of the 3rd Marine Regiment of Rome who had fun with Jesus who was mistreated as a prisoner of war, an enemy of the occupying army stationed in Jerusalem to insure the mopping up action of Operation Israeli Freedom.”

Though McCain has asked supporters not to air ads using Wright, they are planned in North Carolina and in Mississippi. After being asked over and over whether his failure to get the ads pulled signals weakness on his party through the party, McCain answered Monday that he is “not going to be a referee. I have made my position very clear on this issue.”

McCain did criticize Wright on Sunday for the comparison of Marines to Roman legionnaires and of the U.S. and Al Qaeda flags. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said McCain’s bailing out of the GOP internal fight shows weakness.

“Senator McCain will have to do more than send an e-mail to deal with the challenges we face in Iraq and here at home. If he can’t get these ads off the air, how can he lead the country?” Dean asked in a statement.

The Wright controversy does appear to be having some effect on voters. The latest Associated Press-Ipsos national poll of adults, not registered voters, shows Clinton leading presumptive Republican nominee John McCain 50 percent to 41 percent with a 3.6 percent margin of error. Obama leads McCain 46-44 percent to McCain in that poll. Clinton also won the support of North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley. The Tar Heel State votes next week and Obama has been up in polls by double digits there. Indiana also votes May 6.

Talk show host Tammy Bruce told FOX News that Wright’s continued speaking engagements suggests he wants Obama to lose just so he can be proven right that the U.S. is a racist country. Rev. Lee Peterson, founder of the Brotherhood Organization of the New Destiny, suggested Wright’s attempt to sabotage Obama is more personal.

“I think that what he’s trying to do (is) to bring black people together by saying that this is against the black church. He is trying to bring them in so he can get more power and wealth. It is about the wealth and not about black America,” he said.

While others say that Wright is merely speaking truth to power, and has no underhanded objective, University of Virginia Center of Politics director Larry Sabato said that regardless of motivation, Wright is dragging down Obama’s campaign.

“This is not helpful to them. Remember, Barack Obama is trying to run a post-racial campaign because after all, he has to win tens of millions of votes among whites, Asians, Hispanics, in order to get elected president,” Sabato told FOX News. “African American votes are a good base. That will be maybe 10 percent of the overall turnout, but it’s not nearly enough.”

FOX News’ Carl Cameron and Major Garrett contributed to this report.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.