Obama to address racial issue head-on
— -- Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama will deliver what his campaign is billing as "a major address on race and politics" today, following days of controversy over comments by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.
Obama will speak at the National Constitution Center near Philadelphia's Independence Hall, where the nation's founders in 1787 drafted a Constitution that counted each slave as three-fifths of a person.
The speech marks a milestone for Obama, a biracial senator from Illinois who has tried to play down the historic nature of his candidacy as an African-American. He told reporters Monday that he now wants to address "the larger issue of race in this campaign, which has ramped up over the last couple of weeks."
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, said the attention on Wright's controversial preaching is forcing Obama to tackle the race issue head-on.
"He has to put a series of things behind him and he has to do it decisively," she said.
Attention has been placed on sermons by Wright, a Chicago minister whom Obama has identified as a key spiritual adviser. Wright is the retired pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, which Obama attends.
Wright's sermons included scathing denunciations of the nation's foreign and domestic policies. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, he argued that the "chickens were coming home to roost" for a nation that has exercised violence against others. "We nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon," Wright said.
In another sermon, discussing the treatment of blacks, Wright declared: "God damn America for treating our citizens as far less than human."
Obama repudiated the statements, and Wright resigned Friday from the senator's African American Religious Leadership Committee. Still, Obama made it clear Monday he is not breaking with Wright. "I think the caricature that's being painted of him is not accurate," he said.
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