PHILADELPHIA, 19 March 2008 — White House hopeful Sen. Barack Obama, swamped in a controversy over incendiary sermons by his former pastor, yesterday bid to wrench back his fundamental message of racial and political healing. The Democratic Illinois senator, seeking to be the first African-American president, decried the “profoundly distorted” sermons by Reverend Jeremiah Wright but refused to disown the fiery Chicago preacher.

And battling to lance a controversy that threatens to frame his candidacy in racial terms, Obama insisted the United States was capable of overcoming its bitter black-white divide. “Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely — just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed,” Obama said in a landmark speech.

Wright’s language “expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America.” The controversy, which erupted after videos of inflammatory Wright sermons from recent years surfaced on YouTube and conservative media, threatens to alienate both Obama’s “post-racial” appeal and voters in his battle with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party’s nomination.

Wright was shown assailing US and Israeli “terrorism,” calling on blacks to sing “God damn America,” and alleging that AIDS in Africa was spread by the United States. Obama said he did not witness those remarks in church. The black reverend officiated at Obama’s wedding and baptized his two daughters. The candidate used the title of one of Wright’s sermons — “The Audacity of Hope” — for his own best-selling political memoir.

In his speech, Obama said Wright “has been like family to me.” “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother,” he said, recalling that she had sometimes used racially tinged language.

Obama said Wright, 66, had grown up in an era of savage racism, of segregation and legalized discrimination that barred blacks from quality education, decent housing and better jobs.

Rage still lingered in the African-American community, just as anger simmered among many working-class whites struggling to get by. But Obama stressed it was time to right historical wrongs as he delivered his speech in the city where the US Declaration of Independence — stained, he said, by the “original sin of slavery” — was signed.

“Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy — particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own,” Obama said. “But I have asserted a firm conviction — a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people — that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.”