JEREMIAH WRIGHT HAS NEGATIVE EFFECT ON OBAMA: Poll says controversy weakened white support for presidential candidate.

According to the most recent News York Times/CBS News poll, support among white Americans for the presidential candidacy of Senator Barrack Obama “has softened” since the massive media reporting regarding his former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The biggest decline in support took place among white males and upper income whites. Obama’s overall favorability rating dropped 7 points to 62 percent.


However, the poll taken between March 28th and April 2nd, did contain some good news for Obama regarding his close fight with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.


It showed that 74 percent of Democrats felt Obama was the kind of candidate who would unite the nation. Only, 60 percent felt the same way about Mrs. Clinton.


The decline in Obama’s overall popularity appears to have grown out of repeated stories regarding his former Chicago pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright.


Wright came in for heated criticism for suggesting that America’s Middle East policy was in part responsible for the 9-11 terrorist attack on the nation and that the government may have played a role in spreading AIDS in the Black community.

CNN POLL: AMERICA READY FOR BLACK PRESIDENT

A new CNN poll finds seventy-two percent of white Americans and 61 percent of black Americans believe the nation is ready for a black president.

According to CNN.com, that number is higher than it was in 2006, when 65 percent of whites and 54 percent of blacks felt the same way. It's also higher than the proportion of either men or women -- 64 percent and 65 percent, respectively -- who currently believe the nation is ready for a woman in the White House.


Forty years after Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, roughly four in 10 individuals in both groups say that the country has fulfilled all, or at least a great deal, of King's dream. However, they have different views on whether it will ever be fully realized in the United States.


When asked whether race relations will always pose a problem in the United States, about half of black Americans, 52 percent, said yes -- and just 43 percent of whites shared that view. When posed the same question in 1993, 55 percent of blacks and 53 percent of whites thought race relations would always be a problem for the United States.

The top six concerns for both whites and blacks in making their presidential choice this year are exactly the same in the following order -- the economy, Iraq, terrorism, health care, gas prices and Iran -- though blacks place a higher level of importance on all those issues.

• The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll was released Monday and includes interviews with 1,393 adult Americans, including 743 whites and 513 blacks. It was conducted by telephone January 14-17 and has a sampling error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.