ON DEADLINE: Preachers a problem for McCain too

This could be the campaign of loudmouth preacher problems, and not only for Barack Obama. While The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is poster pastor for the type, Republican John McCain's right-wing ecclesiastical stable has a record of ranting, too.

So when the Republicans play the Wright card against Obama, as they have and will again, the Democrats might want to call the hand and raise them a John Hagee, a Rod Parsley or an echo of the late Jerry Falwell. All of those television preachers have voiced views out of tune with the American mainstream. McCain courted all of them for their campaign endorsements, but says that does not mean he agrees with everything they say or believe.

He has indeed repudiated their more outlandish statements, like Hagee's 2006 claim that Hurricane Katrina was the judgment of God for the sins of New Orleans, and that the Roman Catholic Church is a cult and "the great whore." Hagee backed off on the hurricane and has offered an apology of sorts for his anti-Catholic statements.

The San Antonio television preacher expressed deep regret on Tuesday "for any comments that Catholics have found hurtful." That would be quite a list, since he also has called the church apostate, and has suggested that historic Catholic anti-Semitism shaped Adolf Hitler's views of the Jews.

Hagee had said earlier in the campaign season that his comments were mischaracterized, although that is a hard case to make on slurs as explicit as his.

McCain, who already had condemned Hagee's comments about Catholics, called his Tuesday statement a laudable apology and said it was "very helpful." He needs Roman Catholic support, and Hagee's insults might have cost him votes.

Wright, now retired, was Obama's pastor in Chicago, close to the senator and his family, but a campaign liability after fiery sermons denouncing America were resurrected on television. Obama said he hadn't heard them, and denounced them as divisive. After that became an issue, he delivered his first campaign address on race relations, but stopped short of renouncing Wright, until the preacher repeated some of his diatribes in a Washington speech at the end of April. Wright threw in a suggestion that Obama was just playing politics with his earlier criticism.

At that point, the breach was final. Obama said Wright's statements were offensive, divisive and destructive, contradictory to his own views, and would give "comfort to those who prey on hate."

But the Wright tapes are still there, replayed by the North Carolina Republican Party in an ad McCain said should not be run. It was anyhow, briefly on television, but to an Internet audience widened by the controversy. While McCain has disowned the Wright issue, calling it a distraction from the real differences between Republicans and Democrats, it won't go away. Not while there are independent conservative organizations to raise and spend money on anti-Obama TV ads.

McCain's relationship to hard-line preachers is a bit more complex. He renounced them eight years ago, but changed his line when he needed conservative support for his 2008 campaign.

He got it from the late Rev. Falwell, from Hagee, from Parsley of Columbus, Ohio, an influential voice from the conservative pulpit. Parsley wrote in a 2005 book that U.S. conflict with Islam is inevitable because "America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed ..."

In Cincinnati on Feb. 26, McCain called Parsley "one of the truly great leaders in America, a moral compass, a spiritual guide ..."

McCain said his relationship with Hagee and the others is one in which they may endorse him, but he doesn't endorse all their views. And he said it isn't like Obama's link to Wright. "I didn't attend Pastor Hagee's church for 20 years," he said when the anti-Catholic comments threatened to become a campaign problem.

He said the circumstances were different, as they were. His ties to the television preachers were not in church, they were for political purposes. And they were a reversal of his own homily in the 2000 presidential campaign, when he was trying to build support among independents and centrist Republicans.

"Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right," he said.

He swallowed that, made peace with Falwell and delivered the commencement address at his Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., in 2006.

Falwell said he understood McCain's earlier rejection. "It just came down to pure old politics," Falwell said.

Perhaps it still does.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Walter R. Mears reported on presidential politics for The Associated Press from 1960 until 2004. He is retired and lives in Chapel Hill, N.C.