PHILADELPHIA: White House hopeful Barack Obama, swamped by controversy over incendiary sermons by his former pastor, bid on Tuesday to wrench back his fundamental message of racial and political healing.

Obama was due to give a major address here on “race, politics, and unifying our country” that aides said would tackle head-on remarks in newly unearthed videos by his long-time Chicago preacher, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

The flamboyant Wright’s language assailing US “terrorism” and the alleged racism inherent in white America threatens to alienate both Obama’s central appeal and voters in his Democratic nominating battle with Hillary Clinton.

In an interview late on Monday with PBS television, the senator bidding to be the first African-American president said his black reverend’s “stupid statements” had no place in his vision of a modern nation at ease with itself.

“I think the American people recognise that all of us have friends or associates or people who we meet along the way who are not ideal or perfect, but that’s part of, you know, part of what life is about,” Obama said.

“But I’m not sure that we benefit from continuing to perpetuate the anger and the bitterness that I think at this point serves to divide rather than bring us together.” Wright, who has now retired from the Chicago church, resigned last week from his honorary membership on the Obama campaign’s African-American Religious Leadership Committee.

Clinton aides, normally quick to attack the Obama campaign, have shied away from the Wright row but it has been all over conservative media outlets, which are raising doubts about Obama’s ability to carry a general election.

In the videos of sermons from recent years, an impassioned Wright says America brought the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on itself because of its “terrorism” and also castigates Israeli “terrorism” against the Palestinians.

Obama has said he did witness the inflammatory sermons, in which Wright also said African-Americans should sing “God Damn America” to protest their treatment at the hands of their white brethren.

The outspoken preacher officiated at Obama’s wedding and baptized his two daughters. The presidential candidate used the title of one of Wright’s sermons – “The Audacity of Hope” for his own best-selling political memoir.

Comparisons were being made between Obama’s planned speech and former Republican contender Mitt Romney’s December speech about his Mormonism, itself modeled on president John F. Kennedy’s 1960 address on his Catholicism.

“It’s one that he’s reflected on personally with a great deal of intensity. He really feels that it’s important to make this statement,” said the senior senator from Illinois, Richard Durbin, an Obama backer.

Obama’s wife Michelle rejigged her schedule to attend the Philadelphia speech, which was taking place in the run-up to the deadlock Democrats’ next nominating clash in Pennsylvania on April 22.

Obama told PBS that it would have been “naïve” to believe that race would never crop up in his primary battle against Clinton, just as gender was always likely to feature in a race featuring the former first lady.

“But we’ve got to remind ourselves that what we have in common is far more important than what’s different,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Clinton-Obama fight faced a new hurdle after the Florida Democratic Party, whose January primary was annulled over a scheduling row, said it would not hold a new vote.

The state party challenged the Democratic National Committee to come up with a way to see that the state’s voters are represented at the convention in August that will decide whether Obama or Clinton becomes the standard-bearer.

The DNC must now grapple anew with the dilemma of how to seat delegates from the Sunshine State, and Michigan, at the Denver convention and avoid alienating key blocs of voters before the November election.

Clinton easily won the January primaries in the two election battlegrounds, although Obama’s name did not even figure on the Michigan ballot. But the states were stripped of their Denver delegates because they held the contests too early under party rules.—AFP