Obama Campaign Drops Rev. Wright

Jeremiah Wright, the militant Chicago minister and spiritual adviser to Barack Obama, is off the senator’s campaign, CNN reports. Wright will no longer sit on the senator’s African-American Religious Leadership Committee, the campaign announced. Obama has often said he rejects the reverend’s more incendiary opinions, especially his comment that the US deserved the 9/11 attacks. But yesterday the candidate went further, calling some old sermons that have come to light this week "inflammatory and appalling."

"These are a series of incendiary statements that I can't object to strongly enough," the candidate said of Wright's preaching "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human." Obama said he hadn't previously heard this kind of talk from Wright's pulpit—what he had been hearing in church, he said, "was talk about Jesus and talk about faith and values and serving the poor." And he rejected Wright's comments that Hillary Clinton’s road to the White House was easier because she's not black. "I just don't think it's necessary to talk about Senator Clinton or anybody in those terms." (More Barack Obama stories.)