Bill Clinton, he said, may have been from the South and appointed blacks to his Cabinet and opened an office later in Harlem, "but if you really look at the policies he backed, many were worse for blacks than those of the pre-civil rights days."
Hopkins pointed to Clinton's welfare reform policies and the criticism of activist Randall Robinson of Clinton policies toward black Caribbean countries such as Haiti.
"That's what [Wright] was talking about," Hopkins said.
If Wright's rhetoric costs Obama some votes, others believe that would be more than offset by voters moved by Obama's ability to bring religion back into the liberal political message.
Ronald Walters, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, notes that Obama is getting the support of many black preachers who flirted with the Republican Party during the Bush administration, finding its position on cultural issues such as gay marriage and abortion appealing.
"Jeremiah Wright is one of the most influential and well-known black preachers in America," Walters said. "His church is in the center of black culture. It is not some cult. It is not something out of the way. It is a quintessential black church."
Hopkins says those who condemn Wright's message as anti-white do not understand it. For one, he notes that this is the largest congregation, and the largest contributor, in the United Church of Christ, a white church.
"And what he says is not against anybody, it is against the internal evils within the black community itself, the need to deal with those and confront them with strong values," Hopkins said.
"The idea that one would come to Trinity and see symbols or rituals that are anti-white America or hear a Wright sermon against white people is very curious to me," he said. "It's impossible to hold 8,000 people together talking against white people.
"I just tell people if they want to come to Trinity, bring their dancing shoes," he said of the music-filled services that can last three hours.
On Sunday, Wright seemed incensed over a column by avowed atheist Christopher Hitchens that had run the day before in the Chicago Sun-Times. Hitchens decried Obama for giving "his allegiance to a crackpot church with a decidedly ethnic character."
Several times Wright singled out "white reporters" for criticism. He talked of blacks being held down by attitudes of white supremacy, criticizing blacks who obediently follow whatever path whites tell them to. But the scores of whites in the pews were warmly welcomed by the black congregation.
