Video Surfaces of Obama Praising Wright

Amanda Carpenter | August 20, 2008 6:54 PM

Philip Klein of the American Spectator is highlighting an old video of Barack Obama praising his controversial friend and former pastor Rev.Jeremiah Wright. Oddly enough, the vids (

there are actually three) are being praised on liberal blogs for showing Obama's steadfast commitment to his values and ideas.

In this video, around the 2:40 mark, Obama says:
"Wright, who is my pastor, and he is a wonderful man…He's a pastor of a large congregation in Chicago, and one of the interesting things that I discover in my journey to discover what my identity is and who my father is, is also discovering my own faith, which is not necessarily a traditional faith. I don’t come out of an institutionalized religious setting, but what becomes important to me as I work with churches in the South Side of Chicago and low income neighborhoods is to realize that all of the stories and songs of the Church, the hope that is embodied in the Church, the sense of liberation that is embodied in the historically African American Church, is really something that moves me deeply, and I think is probably the main pillar around which a lot of inner city communities are going to be built, and Rev. Wright, my pastor who I speak about in the chapter in the book, I think represents the best of what the black Church has to offer."