WASHINGTON -- At a moment when Sen. Barack Obama is struggling to win over white voters worried about the economy, a series of public appearances by his former pastor is threatening to revive a tempest over race, patriotism and religion that the Democratic front-runner hoped he had quashed.
The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. appeared at the National Press Club yesterday, delivering a defiant address in which he defended and amplified some politically- and racially-charged remarks from past sermons.
The speech was the third nationally televised appearance Wright has made since Friday, in what Democratic strategists and pollsters described as an unwelcome distraction for an Obama campaign that would prefer to see Wright fade from the scene.
Taking questions from news reporters after his speech, Wright stood by some of the most divisive assertions he had made in church sermons - statements that Obama has denounced.
He declined to retract a statement from a post-Sept. 11 sermon that "America's chickens are coming home to roost."
"You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you," Wright said yesterday. "Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic, divisive principles."
Asked about his prior suggestion that the government created AIDS to harm black people, Wright said that "based on the Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything." He was referring to an infamous experiment conducted over decades in which the government allowed blacks to go untreated in order to study syphilis.
He spoke admiringly of the Nation of Islam's leader, Louis Farrakhan, who has drawn constant protests from Jewish groups and others for comments considered anti-Semitic. Wright described Farrakhan as a hugely influential figure - "one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century.
"Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy," he said. "He did not put me in chains, he did not put me in slavery and he didn't make me this color."
Wright had kept a low public profile since portions of his sermons became widely played on television in March, including snippets in which the pastor said, "God damn America."
While Obama, a longtime member of Wright's church in Chicago, partially quelled the controversy over those comments with a speech on race that month, Republicans have signaled their intent to use Wright's comments to damage Obama, and Sen. Hillary Clinton, Obama's rival for the Democratic nomination, has said that Wright would not be her pastor.
