Recent polls show that Barack Obama suffered little or no lasting damage from the Rev. Wright controversy. Bloomberg says on the ground interviews with white Indiana voters tell a different story:
Interviews with dozens of Democrats in this overwhelmingly white region — where voters will go to the polls in the May 6 primary — suggest residual concerns over the controversy involving Obama’s former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
To be sure, this flies in the face of most polls taken after Obama’s widely praised March 18 speech on race and the Wright controversy. In a March 30 Gallup survey, he had widened his lead over Clinton among Democratic voters to 10 points. A week earlier, he was also up 10 points in a Pew Research poll.
In an NBC/Wall Street Journal national survey last week, he ran slightly ahead of Republican John McCain in a general- election match-up, while Clinton ran slightly behind.
The polls are “good news” for Obama, said Jenny Backus, an unaligned Democratic strategist. “He was able to use what was a pretty potentially dangerous issue for his campaign as a way to reinforce his campaign message.”
Unease Among Whites
Still, there are stirrings of unease among white voters, including those who fear the issue will hurt Obama in a general election. Pew also found that 39 percent of all white voters who had heard of the controversy, including Republicans and independents, said it made them less favorable toward Obama.
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