In a radio interview taped Friday for broadcast today, Barack Obama offered a new argument in response to criticisms that he didn’t denounce Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s most incendiary comments at the time they were spoken. Obama says in the interview (with Philadelphia’s Michael Smerconish, partial transcript from The Page) that he’d been confronting Wright on some of his views from the very beginning, and that his stepped-up confrontations with Wright since launching his presidential bid have actually strained relations between them:

I had had conversations with him in the past – in fact from the day I first met him — about some of his views…. When some these remarks first came to light were a year ago, and I actually called him and it created some tensions that were reported in the newspapers.

Why hasn’t Obama make this case more strenuously till now?

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