By Jonathan Allen, CQ Staff

Directly taking on the subject of race, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama today repeated his condemnation of inflammatory remarks made by his ex-pastor and urged Americans not to let race and the ‘politics that breeds division’ distract the country from the key policy issues it needs to solve.

Obama said that the words of his former pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright, were representative of a “profoundly distorted view of this country.” But he also offered praise for Wright, a man he said brought hope through his preaching, led him to Christianity, officiated at his wedding and baptized his children.

Wright has suggested the United States planted the seeds of hatred that led to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Northern Virginia, saying “America’s chickens have come home to roost.” He has also said that the government developed AIDS to destroy people of color and that rather than “God Bless America,” people should sing “Goddamn America.”

In an auditorium across the street from Independence Hall, where the Constitution was written, Obama spoke of the Constitution’s promise of equality, the ongoing battle to realize it and the lingering pain and anger from decades of racial injustice.

“And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States,” he said, standing against a backdrop of eight American flags.

“What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a Civil War and civil disobedience and always at great risk -- to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time,” he said.

It is the first time the Illinois senator has confronted racial politics so directly in a major address on the campaign trail. Obama, who would be the nation’s first black president, has been portrayed by his supporters as a “post racial” candidate who is not defined by the old divisions between white and black Americans.

But Obama has struggled to contain the political damage inflicted last week when videotapes of Wright’s vitriolic sermons surfaced.

In particular, Obama has had difficulty reconciling his own campaign’s talk of a post-racial America with Wright’s blatant racial appeals and condemnations of “the rich white folk who run everything.”

From the pulpit, Wright defined the Democratic presidential nomination fight, between Obama and New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton , who is white, in starkly racial terms.

“I am sick of Negroes who just do not get it. Hillary was not a black boy raised in a single-parent home. Barack was,” he said in a sermon last year “Barack knows what it means to be a black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people. Hillary can never know that. Hillary ain’t never been called a [epithet]. Hillary has never had her people defined as non-present. Hillary ain’t had to work twice as hard just to get accepted by the rich white folk who run everything.”

Obama said racial division -- no matter who tries to exploit it -- as an impediment to progress in other areas of American life.

“The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect,” he said. “And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.”

Despite his focus on race in today’s speech, Obama cast the entire discussion as a distraction from important policy issues facing the country by feeding the “politics of division.”

“We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words,” he said. “We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies. We can do that.”

“But if we do,” he said, “I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.”

Instead, he said, Americans can say “Not this time,” and focus on rebuilding schools, providing health care and resurrecting the economy.

In addition to the storm of controversy over Wright, Obama also has had to parry questions about his commitment the country. Democratic primary voters have criticized him for declining to put his hand over his heart during the playing of the national anthem at an event in Iowa, and blasted his wife for saying in stump speeches that the campaign has made her proud of her country for the first time in her adult life.

“I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union,” Obama said to an invitation-only audience.

And he offered prescriptions for progress and racial healing to both the black and white communities.

“For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past,” he said. “It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life.”

“But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family,” Obama said.

“And it means taking full responsibility for our own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.”

For whites, he said, “the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations.”

Obama said his perspective on race and what he seeks to do as a leader was shaped by being the son of a Kenyan father and a white, American mother, a student at top schools and a resident of one of the poorest countries.

He said he chose to make his run for President because, “I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.”

“This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people,” Obama said. “But it also comes from my own American story.”