Obama to take on race, politics, unity in US

Speech follows controversy over his ex-pastor

Barack Obama, with supporters in Monaca, Pa., yesterday, described the controversy over his former pastor as "a distraction." (Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

SCRANTON, Pa. - After days of growing controversy over remarks by his former pastor, Barack Obama will address his biracial background directly today in a speech on "race, politics, and unifying our country," according to his campaign.

"He wants to talk about race and wants to address the issues that are surrounding Jeremiah Wright," said Sean Smith, an Obama spokesman in Pennsylvania.

Obama's ties to Wright, the longtime pastor of his Chicago church and a man he has described as a spiritual influence, have been a focus of recent media attention due to recently unearthed comments from Wright sermons suggesting a combative Afrocentrism and anti-Americanism at odds with the well-cultivated image of postracial identity central to Obama's biography and his message of national unity.

"He's always presented his campaign as being something that reached beyond the racial divide," said Ken Smukler, a Democratic consultant in the Philadelphia suburbs not aligned with either campaign.

"The problem is these statements are starting to pull him back into the racial divide."

On Friday, in a statement and a number of television interviews, Obama rejected Wright's comments as "inflammatory and appalling," including one made shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, that the United States had invited the attacks as a result of its foreign policy.

Yesterday Obama described the controversy over Wright as "a distraction from the core message of our campaign" in an interview with PBS.

In that interview, Obama signaled a central theme of his speech, saying, "we've got to remind ourselves that what we have in common is far more important than what's different, and that if we're going to solve any of these problems, we've got to come together and bridge our differences in ways that we just have not bridged them before."

Smukler said of the planned address: "This is what campaigns do when problems arise that do not go away. They give major speeches. To me, it's Mitt Romney on religion: he had to give the big speech to frame the issue."

Outside Pittsburgh yesterday, Obama said he would use the speech to talk "about not just Rev. Wright, but the larger issue of race in this campaign which has ramped up over the last couple of weeks."

During that period, Obama has found himself consistently on the defensive over matters of his identity. In piecemeal fashion, Obama has responded to the release of a picture showing him dressed in a native outfit on a visit to Kenya, the repeated use of his middle name "Hussein" by a conservative talk-show host, and comments by former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro that Obama was "very lucky to be who he is."

"You want to take advantage of opportunities to set the record straight," said congressman Chaka Fattah, Obama's most prominent black supporter in Pennsylvania. "The reality is that from his earliest days he has used these opportunities as teaching moments to talk to people about coming together."

After indications that showed Obama had narrowed the gap with Hillary Clinton among white voters, last week's primary in Mississippi broke down starkly along racial lines.

According to exit polls, Obama won 92 percent of black voters but only 26 percent of white voters.

Supporters of both candidates have predicted that race would remain a factor in next month's primary in Pennsylvania, which has a black population of nearly 11 percent, slightly less than the nationwide share.

In an interview last week, state Representative Jewell Williams, an Obama supporter who represents a largely black district in Philadelphia, said he anticipated "a race campaign" in the state's largest city, split almost evenly between black and white.

"You've got conservative whites here, and I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate," Governor Ed Rendell, a Clinton supporter told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last month.

With tomorrow's speech, Obama is "probably speaking to that sliver of people who consider themselves open-minded and undecided and even independent. I don't think this will pull any Clinton voters back to him," said Carl Singley, a former dean of the Temple University Law School who is supporting Obama. "I don't know how he assuages the concerns of a white voter who's going to hold his black skin against him. For the most part, Rendell was probably right in terms of some voters in certain locations in the state."