Obama: Wright flap has 'shaken me up'

(CNN) -- Sen. Barack Obama told CNN on Wednesday the recent uproar over his former pastor's sermons has reminded him of the odds he faces in winning the White House.

In some ways, this controversy has actually shaken me up a little bit and gotten me back into remembering that the odds of me getting elected have always been lower than some of the other conventional candidates," the Illinois senator told CNN's Anderson Cooper in an exclusive one-on-one interview.

Obama declined to speculate on whether the controversy surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons may damage him politically, but said his campaign does best when it doesn't follow the "textbook."

"If I was just running the textbook campaign -- doing the conventional thing -- I probably wasn't going to win because Sen. [Hillary] Clinton was going to be much more capable of doing that than I would be," he said. "We had tremendous success, and I think we were starting to get a little comfortable and conventional right before Texas and Ohio."

The exclusive interview came one day after Obama delivered a speech on race and politics in Philadelphia, during which he denounced some of Wright's comments, but said he could not repudiate the man himself.

"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. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love," Obama said in the speech.

Asked why he didn't denounce the controversial comment when he first heard of them more than a year ago, Obama noted Wright was on the verge of retirement.

"I told him that I profoundly disagreed with his positions. As I said before, he was on, at that stage, on the verge of retirement. ... You make decisions about these issues. And my belief was that given that he was about to retire, that for me to make a political statement respecting my church at that time wasn't necessary."

Obama: Wright flap has 'shaken me up' - CNN.com

Obama should have told the Rev. Wright that he disagreed with him years ago but then again,hindsight is 20/20.

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"Destiny must be shaped and not left to mere chance."..Spencer Collins