Will speech give Obama's campaign a boost?

NEW YORK — By using the furor over his spiritual mentor to probe the issue of racism, Barack Obama on Tuesday may have delivered one of the riskiest presidential campaign speeches since John F. Kennedy challenged voters to believe a Catholic leader could separate church and state.

And while some political experts believe his eloquent discourse may have righted his shaken presidential campaign, others say it may not be enough.

"I've never heard anybody give a speech like that, ever. It transcends John F. Kennedy's speech on his faith and his politics," said G. Terry Madonna, director for the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Pennsylvania's Franklin & Marshall College. "I think his candidacy was in serious, serious trouble. I think that this speech saved his campaign."

But many voters may feel Obama didn't sufficiently distance himself from his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr, who has called on blacks to say, "God damn America" and suggested AIDS in Africa was spread by the United States.

Other voters, including some African-Americans, may conversely feel that Obama went too far in condemning Wright.

And Obama's address isn't likely to sway many working-class white Democrats, who helped Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton win in Texas and Ohio and appear poised to do the same for her in Pennsylvania's Democratic presidential primary April 22.

"It was a risky speech, but on the whole it will help more than it will hurt," said Dante Scala, a University of New Hampshire political science professor. "But it's going to take more than one speech for him to get white working-class Democrats. He's going to have to put himself out front of those voters again and again. He's got to find a way of telling them: 'What I have in mind will help you.' "

Stephanie Robinson, president of the Jamestown Project, a multi-ethnic think tank in Boston, said the speech was important because it "calls on us to have a conversation about the color line. But it needed to stop the hemorrhaging so Barack could get back on message. We don't know yet whether that has happened."

In his speech, Obama condemned Wright's potentially divisive comments. But he also said he considered the pastor, who married him and baptized his children, to be as impossible to disown as his beloved white grandmother, who sometimes made racially insensitive comments.

That comparison won't necessarily assuage voters who already question why Obama remained at Wright's church for nearly two decades. "Some people may say, 'you have no control over who your family is but you do have control over who your pastor is,' " said Stu Rothenberg, an independent political analyst in Washington.

On the other end of the spectrum, some African-American religious leaders and intellectuals wish Obama had defended Wright more energetically.

Wright is not expressing divisive anger but rather "righteous indignation" over racial inequalities, said Eddie Glaude Jr., an expert in African-American and religious studies at Princeton University. "Many white Americans embrace America because of" what it gives them, but "many African-Americans embrace our country in spite of" what it gives them, Glaude said.

Some political observers said that as the first black presidential candidate to come within reach of a nomination, Obama should have addressed race earlier rather than trying to position himself as a "post-racial" candidate. Others said the timing could be fortuitous. "If he's smart he's going to keep talking about race so the media and the voters will become exhausted on the topic," said Larry Sabato, a political expert at the University of Virginia.

Under that scenario, if Obama wins the nomination, "the general election will be about Iraq and the economy and George Bush, and Obama will be the next president," Sabato said. But if the discussion is about race, he said, Obama risks losing to GOP nominee John McCain.