Ferraro slams Obama for comparing her to preacher

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Hillary Clinton supporter Geraldine Ferraro slammed Barack Obama on Thursday for comparing her, during a speech on race relations, with the preacher at the center of a political firestorm.

Ferraro, who was forced to quit Clinton's campaign last week after suggesting that Obama had an advantage because he is black, told a California newspaper her comments were quite different from the incendiary, racially charged sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

"To equate what I said with what this racist bigot has said from the pulpit is unbelievable," Ferraro told the Daily Breeze in an interview. "(Obama) gave a very good speech on race relations, but he did not address the fact that this man is up there spewing hatred."

Wright's fiery sermons at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, where Obama and his wife have worshiped for two decades, have become a problem for the Illinois senator as he battles Clinton for the Democratic nomination.

Obama's speech on Tuesday was intended to quiet the furor over Wright, who has claimed that the U.S. brought the September 11 attacks on itself with its foreign policy and that the government released the AIDS virus to kill black people.

"What (Wright) is doing is spewing that stuff out to young people and to younger people than Obama and putting it in their heads that its OK to say 'God damn America' and to beat up on white people," Ferraro told the Breeze. "You don't preach that from the pulpit."

Ferraro, the trailblazing 1984 Democratic vice presidential candidate, left the Clinton campaign during a flap that began when she told the Breeze that "if Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position."

Though Obama has said he does not consider Ferraro's remarks racist, he referred to them in his speech.

"We can dismiss Rev. Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro in the aftermath of her recent statements as harboring some deep-seated bias," he said in the speech.

(Editing by Alan Elsner)