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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (122160)	5/2/2008 2:14:32 PM
From: TideGlider	Respond to of 173976

BY REID J. EPSTEIN \| reid.epstein@newsday.com May 1, 2008 With polls showing increasingly tight races in Indiana and North Carolina's Democratic presidential primaries, political experts in those states said yesterday that Sen. Barack Obama's renouncement of his firebrand former pastor may not be enough to stop his political bleeding. Polls show Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton virtually tied in Indiana and Obama's once-formidable lead in North Carolina shrinking, though surveys for the two states' Tuesday primaries were taken before the latest incendiary comments made by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But Wright's comments Monday to the National Press Club - in which he suggested the United States was attacked because it terrorized others - will likely cause some middle-class white North Carolina voters to abandon Obama, according to Michael Munger, the chairman of Duke University's political science department. "Being associated with militant black political figures, even if it is a preacher, makes people uncomfortable," said Munger, the Libertarian Party's candidate for North Carolina governor. "To the extent that Reverend Wright is going on the offensive, I don't think they'll forgive him." Wright's prominence will give voters who are uneasy about voting for an African-American candidate reason to vote for Clinton or stay home, said Samuel Moseley, the political chairman at North Carolina A&T State University. "For those who are devoted to [Obama], Reverend Wright is a side issue," Moseley said. "But for those who were on the edge, an incident like the Reverend Wright story gives them justification with not being comfortable with him." The Obama campaign tried to blunt the fallout of Wright's comments by announcing three superdelegate endorsements yesterday. U.S. Rep. Baron Hill, who represents conservative southern Indiana, lauded Obama's attempt to disassociate himself from Wright as he announced his support. "One of the tests of a true leader is his ability and willingness to come to a new conclusion based on new events," Hill said in a statement released by the campaign yesterday. "Senator Obama did just that." In Indiana, where polls show the two candidates in a virtual dead heat, voters are likely to forgive Obama when it comes to his relationship with Wright, said Philip Goff, the director of the Center for Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. "With this action [Tuesday] coupled with his speech last month, I think he did himself a lot of good," Goff said. Obama should still be concerned, Goff said, about the comments he made about "bitter" Americans who "cling to" religion, guns and xenophobia. "It wasn't just what the preacher said in the past, it was the comments on rural voters in Pennsylvania," Goff said. "That has had as much traction here as the Reverend Wright comments. Obama has not done as good a job distancing himself from that." Obama needs to focus his campaign's energy on convincing voters of all stripes of his authenticity, said Ferrel Guillory, the director of the Program on Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "He has to show by his bearing and his rhetoric that he's got a deep understanding of the condition of the American people," Guillory said. "He has to show that he's not this kind of celebrity that's out of touch."