Only a few years ago, the tightness of the bond between Mr. Obama and Mr. Wright was difficult to overstate. Mr. Obama titled his second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” after one of Mr. Wright’s sermons, and his pastor was the first one he thanked when he gained election as a United States senator in 2004. “Let me thank my pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. of Trinity United Church of Christ,” Mr. Obama said that night, before going on to mention his family and friends.
In this learned and radical pastor, Mr. Obama found a guide who could explain Jesus and faith in terms intellectual no less than emotional, and who helped a man of mixed racial parentage come to understand himself as an African-American. “Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black,” Mr. Obama wrote in his autobiography “Dreams From My Father.”
At the same time, as Mr. Obama’s friends and aides now acknowledge, he was aware that, shorn of their South Side Chicago context, the words and cadences of a politically left-wing black minister could have a very problematic echo. So Mr. Obama haltingly distanced himself from his pastor.
Mr. Obama announced in early 2007 that he would be running for president. He invited Mr. Wright to deliver the invocation at the event in Springfield, but the evening before the event, Mr. Wright answered his cellphone and heard an apologetic soon-to-be candidate. Rolling Stone had just published a profile of Mr. Obama that included some colorful snippets from the pastor’s sermons.
“ ‘You can get kind of rough in the sermons,’ ” Mr. Wright said Mr. Obama told him. “ ‘Rather than have you out front, we thought it would be best to not have you do the invocation.’ ” |
