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WINSTON-SALEM — Is it safe to say that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright won't be leading the opening prayer at the inaugural?

Sen. Barack Obama on Tuesday declared, "That's enough," after a three-day media blitz by his former Chicago pastor grew increasingly "outrageous" and "appalling," in the words of the Democratic presidential front-runner.

In a turn of the screw as peculiar in timing as content — just a week out from critical May 6 primaries here and in Indiana — Obama found his campaign hijacked by questions about the retired pastor.

This was after a weekend in which Wright gave the NAACP keynote address, a PBS interview and a National Press Club talk in which he praised Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and accused the U.S. government of terrorism and conspiring to spread AIDS in the black community.

Obama, who had said a day earlier that he had not seen the televised remarks when the furor erupted, said Tuesday the incident had damaged a 20-year friendship with the minister who performed the Obamas' marriage ceremony and baptized their children.

"Based on his remarks, I don't know him as well as I thought I did," Obama said in a news conference after a town hall rally at Joel Coliseum Annex. "The person I saw yesterday was not the person I met 20 years ago."

Wright's weekend appearances were in response to what he said he saw as an attack on the black church. In fact, the story began widespread criticism of Wright personally for a post-9/11 sermon suggesting the U.S. brought the attacks on itself.

But even in calling for reconciliation over the weekend, Wright mocked white Americans and accused Obama, the candidate he ostensibly supports, of "political posturing."

For a campaign that has stressed unity — and up until defeats in Ohio and Pennsylvania, displayed broad demographic appeal — the Wright saga has been an ironic distraction.

As the half-capacity Winston-Salem crowd illustrated, Obama draws on black and white, young and old voters whose questions focus on war and economics, not religion and politics.

Perhaps seeking to allay the perception that Obama attracts less support from blue-collar whites than does Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the man who introduced Obama at yesterday's rally was a third-generation textile mill worker — literally wearing a blue collar.

Obama lumped Clinton and Republican candidate Sen. John McCain together as "the two Washington candidates," arguing that he alone among the three could change the way special interests control Washington.

To the question of why his support seemed to flag among working-class white men, Obama appeared to have put behind him the flap over his remarks about small-town voters being "bitter." He spoke of his own rural Kansas upbringing, and confidently ticked off a list of primaries where he did prevail in middle America, places where he said voters were "hungry" for a change from the "divisive politics of the past."

But alas, in what may have been his last swing through North Carolina before Tuesday's primary, he dealt not with war and economics, but religion and politics — divisive politics at that.

"This has been such a spectacle," a stern, subdued Obama told reporters backstage. "When I go to church, it's not for a spectacle. It's to pray."

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com