During an interview with a Philadelphia radio station yesterday, Barack Obama was asked to clarify remarks he made about his grandmother in his speech on race Tuesday, where he addressed his complex relationship with his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

“I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.  I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe,” he said candidly of his maternal grandmother.
When explaining the remark a few days later during the radio interview, Obama said, “The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t. But she is a typical white person who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred into our experiences that don’t go away, and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of race in our society.”

Many pundits and commentators pounced, denouncing Obama’s use of the phrase “typical white person” as racially charged. Watch his response at a press availability today to those accusations below.

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Note Obama volunteered volunteered the part of his answer on what he did and did not hear during Reverend Wright’s sermons that he considered to be “controversial.” He’s also gotten criticism from “conservative commentators” about another line from his Philadelphia speech on race, when he said, “Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy?  Of course.  Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church?  Yes.  Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views?  Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.”

Senior Obama advisor David Axelrod and Communications Director Robert Gibbs hosted a conference call with reporters Sunday, while the senator himself spent the day with his family. The intent of the call was to focus on Senator Clinton’s lack of transparency. Gibbs outlined four questions directed towards Senator Clinton:

1.    Will the Clinton campaign release their full tax returns, including schedules?
2.    Will Senator Clinton release all of her earmark requests?                                                                  3.    Will the Clinton campaign release the names of all donors to the Clinton foundation and to the Clinton library, and if not, why?
4.    Will the Clinton campaign instruct the Clinton Library to release all of their records?

“The Clinton campaign has made a premium out of making sure that candidates are vetted, that transparency is full, and their failure to continue to answer these questions simply brings us another series of questions, which is what is Senator Clinton hiding and what is lurking in those documents that she believes voters don’t have a right to know?” Gibbs asked.

But during the question and answer period of the call, the reporters switched gears, focusing the latest hot topic in the Democratic race - Obama’s relationship with the controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

Axelrod stressed Obama had  been forthright on the controversy and had condemned Wright’s statements, pointing out this was a personally difficult time for Senator Obama. “As you know Reverend Wright married him, introduced him, as [Obama] said, to the church, brought him into the church, into Christianity, baptized his children. So this is a painful thing for him because he condemns the things that Rev. Wright said, but he also knows him as a person, so it’s a difficult matter for him.”

When asked if the story would damage the campaign, Axelrod observed, “Reverend Wright is gone from the church now; he’s no longer the pastor of the church and I think people will hear Senator Obama on this issue, and…they understand that these do not represent his views, and they don’t represent the sum total of what Rev Wright has done over the years or their relationship. I think that this will pass, but we understand there’s a lot of interest in it now.”

Axelrod then asked Gibbs, “Robert, do you have anything to add?” Gibbs replied, “No, I think that covers it.”

Yesterday Barack Obama published a statement on his former pastor’s incendiary sermons on the Huffington Post blog and conducted interviews on the three cable networks. Today, he brought it up the hot topic on the campaign trail at a high school in Plainfield, Indiana - an effort to take ownership of the problematic issue rather than let it fester on its own. At times like these when our divisions become the focus, it is important to remember that we can come together as a nation in spite of the things that divide us, Obama told the racially diverse crowd.

Senator Obama waited until the end of his Indiana town hall meeting to bring up the sore subject. He began by recalling Bobby Kennedy’s speech in Indianapolis after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. Read his remarks, in full, below.

“[RFK] said at that moment of anguish, he said we’ve got a choice in taking the rage and bitterness and disappointment and letting it fester and dividing us further, so that we no longer see each other as Americans, but we see each other as separate and apart and at odds with each other. Or we can take a different path that says we have stories, but we have common dreams and common hopes and we can decide to walk down this road together and remake America once again. You know, I think about those words often, especially in the last several weeks because this campaign started on the basis that we are one America. As I said in my speech in the convention in 2004, there’s no black America, white America, or Asian America or Latino America. There’s the United States of America.

“I noticed over the last several weeks, the forces of division have started to raise their ugly heads again. I’m not here to cast blame or point fingers because everybody senses that there’s been this shift. You’ve been seeing it in the reporting. You’ve been seeing it in some of the commentary of supporters on all sides. Most recently, you’ve heard some statements of my former pastor that were incendiary and that I completely reject although I knew him and know him as somebody in my church who talked to me about Jesus and family and friendships, but clearly if all I knew was those statements I saw on television, I’d be shocked. And it reminds me that we’ve got a tragic history when it comes to race in this country. We’ve got a lot of pent up anger and bitterness and misunderstanding. But what I continue to believe in is that this country wants to move beyond these kinds of divisions. This country wants something different,” he said. The crowd of some 3,000 began to cheer and chant, “Yes we can,” a mantra many Obama supporters have repeated since the candidate used it throughout his speech following his New Hampshire primary defeat.

“I just want to say to everybody here that as somebody who was born into a diverse family, as somebody who has little pieces of America all in me, I will not allow us to lose this moment where we can not forget about our past and not ignore the very real forces of racial inequality and gender inequality and the other things that divide us. I don’t want us to forget that we have to acknowledge them and lift them up. When people say things like what my former pastor said, you have to speak our forcefully against them, but what you have to also do is to remember what Bobby Kennedy said that it is within our power to join together to truly make a United States of America.

“And that we have to do not just so our children live in a more peaceful country and a more peaceful world, but that is also the only way that we’re going to deliver on the big issues that we’re facing in this country. We can’t solve health care – divided. We cannot create an economy that works when we’re divided. We can’t fight terrorism divided. We can’t care for our veterans divided. We have to come together. That’s what this campaign is about, that’s why you’re here, that’s why we’re going to win this election,” he concluded.