Rasmussen details the damage:
Pastor Jeremiah Wright, who has become part of the national political dialogue in recent days, is viewed favorably by 8% of voters nationwide. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 58% have an unfavorable view of the Pastor whose controversial comments have created new challenges for Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign.
Wright was Obama’s Pastor until he retired last month, but Obama has repudiated the preacher’s comments.
Seventy-three percent (73%) of voters say that Wright’s comments are racially divisive. That opinion is held by 77% of White voters and 58% of African-American voters. In addressing the issue, Obama warned against injecting race into the campaign .
Most voters, 56%, said Wright’s comments made them less likely to vote for Obama. That figure includes 44% of Democrats. Just 11% of voters say they are more likely to vote for Obama because of Wright’s comments.
Obama will deliver a speech on race in Philadelphia tomorrow. Given the Wright issue, it’s guaranteed to be closely watched.
John Derbyshire thinks that this is the end of the Obama campaign:
Obama’s toast. He may yet get the Democratic nomination, but tens of millions of Americans who are neither (a) black nor (b) guilty white liberals are simply appalled that Obama would revere a guy like Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, whatever the particularities of which services he did and didn’t attend. It defies belief that Obama knew this man for all that time, intimately enough to have him supervise at the Obama wedding and the children’s baptisms, yet did not know that Wright is a white-hating, America-hating crank. Who on earth believes this?
The MSM can’t smother this, not in the age of the web, though they are trying mightily. (The Sunday New York Times “Week in Review” Section had nothing about Wright; neither did the main news section.) Americans are a fair-minded people, who find double standards obnoxious. A guy who says “nappy-headed ho’s” in an irreverent radio show is dragged round the city walls behind a chariot to the delighted howls of a mob of self-righteous “anti-racists”; yet a man who uses the authority of the cloth to damn our country and curse white people, is praised as a “biblical scholar” by a candidate for the presidency? I don’t think so. This won’t stand. The man is toast.
Is Derb right ? I’m not sure, but I think that this may well be the end of Obama-mania. Barack Obama is no longer a god, he’s just a regular politician.
For what it’s worth, the latest Gallup national poll shows Clinton taking a slight lead for the first time in a week:
PRINCETON, NJ — Gallup Poll Daily election tracking from March 14-16 finds Hillary Clinton’s bid for the 2008 Democratic nomination supported by 47% of national Democratic voters, and Barack Obama’s candidacy favored by 45%.
Obama led Clinton in all Gallup Poll Daily tracking reports from March 9 through March 16, indicating he had a real, albeit slim, advantage in national Democratic preferences over this period. While not statistically significant, Clinton’s two percentage point advantage in today’s report is a notable shift, particularly in light of the political storm Obama has faced over the past few days concerning controversial political statements made by the former pastor of his Chicago church.
The problem Obama faces right now is that there is nothing going on in this race between now and April 22nd’s Pennsylvania primary. Meaning that a lot of attention is being paid to this story right now while the Clinton campaign remains uncharacteristically silent about this issue:
The Clinton campaign, which normally is eager to hit the Obama campaign from every possible angle, is firmly refusing to make any comment on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright matter. Asked about it on a conference call a few moments ago, Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson answered, “That will be something for voters to assess, and I don’t have any comment on it beyond that.” Asked a second time, Wolfson said, “I would give you the same answer. Voters will have to make an assessment about that and come to a judgment.”
Translation: When your opponent is lobbing cannonballs at himself, there’s really no need to get involved.
