WASHINGTON – Barack Obama‘s worst nightmare, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, yesterday delivered his most brutal wallop to his pal’s campaign as he hailed hatemonger Louis Farrakhan and accused the United States of committing terrorism.
Wright called racial inflamer Farrakhan “one of the most important voices of the 20th and 21st century” and likened him to American icon stockbroker EF Hutton.
NEW: Hillary V. Obama Deathmatch — Play at Home!
PHOTOS: Obama Shoots Hoops at UNC
“When LF speaks, black America listens,” Wright said. “Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He didn’t put me in chains, he did not put me in slavery, and he didn’t make me this color.”
Wright, in a bombastic, nationally televised speech to the National Press Club, ripped the United States as a ruthless, modern-day Roman Empire trying to rule the world – and said it brought 9/11 on itself.
“You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it to never come back to you,” Wright said, mentioning the US nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
He griped that the government has never “confessed” to nor officially apologized for slavery – and he refused to back off his assertion that America invented the AIDS virus to kill black people.
“Based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything,” said Wright, who was provided bodyguards by Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, according to The Washington Post.
Asked about his patriotism, the former Marine said, “I served six years in the military. Does that make me patriotic? How many years did [Vice President Dick] Cheney serve?”
Cheney avoided the draft during Vietnam.
Obama, campaigning in North Carolina, again tried to distance himself from Wright.
“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 told reporters outside his campaign jet.
“I think people will understand that I am not perfect,” he added, “and that, you know, there are gonna be folks in my past like Rev. Wright that may cause them some concern.”
Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday repeated that she would have left a church if Wright were its minister, and she accused Republicans of politicizing the issue in campaign ads.
Wright, the retired minister at the United Church of Christ in Chicago, where Obama worshipped for years, claimed that the Illinois senator disavowed him only because he’s a candidate for the presidency.
“We both know that if Sen. Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected,” Wright said.
“He had to distance himself, because he’s a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American,” the pastor said.
“Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls,” Wright said.
Wright’s latest comments, on the heels of a whirlwind media tour, come at an exceptionally bad time for Obama, who is courting white working-class voters in Indiana to turn back an re-energized Clinton.
But a new Associated Press-Ipsos poll suggests that Obama is losing ground among whites in the wake of Wright’s public comments.
The poll shows Clinton beating Republican candidate John McCain, 50 percent to 41 percent, in a potential matchup, while Obama would be tied with McCain, leading 46 percent to 44 percent.
Among the white voters polled, Clinton received 43 percent to McCain’s 48 percent, while Obama landed only 38 percent to McCain’s 51 percent.
David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, appeared clearly worried about Wright’s affect on his candidate’s campaign.
“We don’t have any control over Reverend Wright,” Axelrod told The Times of London. “There’s not a thing we can do about it.
“Obviously, I don’t think we would have encouraged him to go on a media tour.”
Additional reporting by Charles Hurt