Obama Takes Image Rehab to The View

Barack Obama "wouldn't have felt comfortable staying there at the church" had Jeremiah Wright not retired this year, he said today on The View. Obama reiterated his denunciation of his ex-pastor’s sermons, saying Wright had “deeply offended people,” CNN reports. He also told Barbara Walters & Co. that he’d spoken with Wright since the scandal erupted, and the preacher is “saddened by what’s happened.”

Attempting to get in front of another brewing controversy related to Trinity United Church, Obama told the Jerusalem Post this week, "I certainly wasn't in church when that outrageously wrong Los Angeles Times piece was re-printed in the bulletin." The op-ed was the work of an official with Hamas, which Obama blasted as "a terrorist organization, responsible for the deaths of many innocents." (More Barack Obama stories.)