Jeremiah's lamentations put paid to Obama's prayers

Washington: The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, explaining why he had waited so long before breaking his silence about his incendiary sermons, offered a paraphrase from the Bible on Monday: "It is better to be quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

Barack Obama's former pastor should have stuck with the wisdom of the prophets.

Instead, Wright has gone on a media tour, climaxing with his appearance at the National Press Club on Monday morning. There, he reignited a controversy about race that Obama had only recently extinguished - and added lighter fuel.

Far from softening his provocative words, he held himself out as a spokesman for millions of churchgoing African Americans. "This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright," he argued. "It is an attack on the black church launched by people who know nothing about the African American religious tradition."

Most problematic for the Democratic presidential front-runner was Wright's suggestion that Obama was insincere in distancing himself from his former pastor. "He didn't distance himself," Wright announced. "He had to distance himself - because he's a politician - from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American."

Wright spoke of friends who told him that "we both know that if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected," and he said of his past parishioner: "Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls."

And that apparent decision by Obama to exclude Wright from his presidential kickoff announcement? Didn't happen. "I started it off downstairs with him, his wife and children, in prayer."

The pastor's performance puts new pressure on the candidate to say forcefully that Wright doesn't speak for him or the African American church. Though the candidate said on Fox News Sunday that Wright had been "simplified and caricatured" by the sound bites of his inflammatory words, Wright willingly embraced the sentiments of those sound bites on Monday.

When the moderator asked the audience whether Wright should apologise for his "God damn America" remarks. Shouts of "No!" followed, and Wright used the occasion to demand an apology for slavery.