Obama Responds to Pastor Pile-On

If you've had a TV tuned to cable news today, you would have seen video clips of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright - Barack Obama's pastor from Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago - plastered all over your TV screens. David Knowles commented in detail on Reverend Wright's controversial pulpit fulminations, and his take on it, here.

While this probably should have happened sooner, the Obama campaign has quickly sought to distance the candidate from the Pastor's remarks. Obama has in the past removed himself from Wright's statements and his association with Louis Farrakhan. I am confused why it has taken this long for the campaign to address head-on what they had to know was going to be a problem for them. Sean Hannity and others on Fox have been harping on this for months. Probably the only people that feel good about this right now are the Clinton campaign, Fox News and some of the more narrow-minded commenters on the internets.
I'm glad to see the campaign taking some action here. This in no way lessens my support of my candidate, but there are millions of Americans not familiar with some styles of African American preaching that will need to be reassured that the candidate does not condone every word that comes out of a pastor's mouth.

Obama has a very clear denunciation of Wright's comments on the Huffington Post - put up just a short time ago. I won't reproduce it in full here, but the overall gist of it can be gleaned from this little bit:

Let me say at the outset that I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have been the subject of this controversy. I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country or serves to divide us from our allies. I also believe that words that degrade individuals have no place in our public dialogue, whether it's on the campaign stump or in the pulpit. In sum, I reject outright the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue.

Obama will be on MSNBC's Countdown at 8:00 tonight and CNN's Anderson Cooper's 360 at 10:00 (both times Eastern).

If you truly wish to give him a fair hearing on this subject, then watch or read his statement. Otherwise, you can still always post here.