"Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking for the first time directly about the association between the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Sen. Barack Obama, said "getting up and moving" would have been the right response to hearing the preacher's fiery sermons.

Wright "would not have been my pastor," Clinton said during an interview with the conservative editorial board of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, whose endorsement she is seeking. "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend," she said. Obama refused to disavow Wright even as he said he disagreed with some of his sermons.

Clinton had declined for many days to talk about the Wright controversy, which escalated to such an extent that Obama delivered an address on race in Philadelphia last week. Her advisers, during a conference call on the state of the Democratic race, declined on Tuesday to fan the flames. But Clinton, speaking in Pittsburgh, cited her earlier condemnation of radio host Don Imus, after he insulted the Rutgers' women's basketball team, as an example of how Obama should have reacted to his pastor's words.

"You know, I spoke out against Don Imus, saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that," the paper quoted Clinton as saying. "I think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do that, if not explicitly, then implicitly by getting up and moving."

Bill Burton, an Obama spokesman, issued a response: "After originally refusing to play politics with this issue, it's disappointing to see Hillary Clinton's campaign sink to this low in a transparent effort to distract attention away from the story she made up about dodging sniper fire in Bosnia. The truth is, Barack Obama has already spoken out against his pastor's offensive comments and addressed the issue of race in America with a deeply personal and uncommonly honest speech. The American people deserve better than tired political games that do nothing to solve the larger challenges facing this country."" (Anne E. Kornblut, The Washington Post, March 25, 2008)