Disinvitation by Obama Is Criticized

Commentary
By Jeffrey Blankfort

This article buried on page A17 of Tuesday's NY Times is most revealing and will certainly do damage to Obama's standing among African-American voters which he sought to cultivate with his trip to Selma on the weekend. Joe Biden has described Obama as "clean," mirroring the goal of the late J Edgar Hoover to replace Dr. King as a Black community leader, as Cynthia McKinney pointed out in Oakland in February when asked her opinion about Obama.
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The New York Times

March 6, 2007
By JODI KANTOR

CHICAGO, March 5

Abstract

The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., senior pastor of the popular Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago and spiritual mentor to Senator Barack Obama, thought he knew what he would be doing on Feb. 10, the day of Senator Obama's presidential announcement. After all, back in January, Mr. Obama had asked Mr. Wright if he would begin the event by delivering a public invocation. But Mr. Wright said Mr. Obama called him the night before the Feb. 10 announcement and rescinded the invitation to give the invocation. "Fifteen minutes before Shabbos I get a call from Barack," Mr. Wright said in an interview on Monday, recalling that he was at an interfaith conference at the time. "One of his members had talked him into uninviting me," Mr. Wright said, referring to Mr. Obama's campaign advisers. Some black leaders are questioning Mr. Obama's decision to distance his campaign from Mr. Wright because of the campaign's apparent fear of criticism over Mr. Wright's teachings, which some say are overly Afrocentric to the point of excluding whites.

When his enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli" to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Mr. Wright recalled, "with Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell." Mr. Wright added that his trip implied no endorsement of either Louis Farrakhan's views or Qaddafi's. Mr. Wright said that in the phone conversation in which Mr. Obama disinvited him from a role in the announcement, Mr. Obama cited an article in Rolling Stone, "The Radical Roots of Barack Obama." According to the pastor, Mr. Obama then told him, "You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we've decided is that it's best for you not to be out there in public."