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Confronted with a crisis that threatens to ruin his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, a grim Barack Obama has condemned the fulminations of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, in the strongest language possible short of swearing.

“I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw yesterday,” Mr. Obama told reporters at a sombre press conference here in North Carolina, where he is campaigning in advance of next Tuesday's primary.

“The person I saw yesterday was not the person I met 20 years ago,” he said. Rev. Wright's comments Monday to the National Press Club in Washington were “giving comfort to those who prey on hate … they offend me, they rightly offend all Americans, and they should be denounced.”

It was an irreconcilable breach with the man who had married him and his wife, Michelle, who had baptized their daughters and whom Mr. Obama only weeks ago described as “like family.”

Mr. Wright was also the one who gave a sermon that inspired the title for Mr. Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope.

In several appearances in recent days, most notably during the speech and question-and-answer session Monday, Rev. Wright repeated and amplified sensational snippets from his sermons that appeared weeks ago on YouTube and were picked up by the media.

He affirmed his accusation that the attacks of Sept. 11 were the fruits of U.S. state-sponsored terrorism; that the U.S. government may have propagated the AIDS virus to ravage the black community; and that the black activist Louis Farrakhan was one of the greatest figures of the 20th and 21st centuries.

When these incendiary assertions were first broadcast, Mr. Obama said, he tried to give Rev. Wright the benefit of the doubt. He placed them within the context of the American racial divide, in the major address he delivered last month in Philadelphia.

But “the insensitivity and the outrageousness of his performance in the question-and-answer period, I think, shocked me,”

Mr. Obama clearly takes Rev. Wright's latest escapades personally. The Chicago pastor's performance was “a show of disrespect for me,” he said. “It is also, I think, an insult to what we're trying to do with this campaign.”

Mr. Obama wanted there to be no doubt about the depth of his anger. He described Rev. Wright's oratory as “a bunch of rants that aren't grounded in truth” that were “divisive and destructive.”

“When I say I find these comments appalling, I mean it,” he declared. “It contradicts everything that I'm about and who I am.”

Now, Mr. Obama must wait, to see whether his denunciation of his former pastor mollifies the voters in the coming primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, and the almost 300 superdelegates who have not declared their preference for either him or challenger Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Obama currently enjoys a seemingly insurmountable lead in pledged delegates, and has closed the gap among the superdelegates. But if the remaining primaries between next week and June 3 go against him, and if a strong majority of the superdelegates decide that Mr. Obama's past association with Rev. Wright betrays a fatal lack of judgment, then he could lose the nomination.

Mr. Obama's campaign has been dogged with on-the-eve imbroglios that have contributed to his defeat in several primaries. Comments by his economic adviser reportedly assuring Canadian officials that Mr. Obama's criticisms of the North American Free Trade Agreement were merely campaign fodder hurt him in the Ohio primary. Remarks at an off-the-record gathering that rural voters resorted to God, guns and prejudice because they were bitter over their economic plight helped him lose Pennsylvania.

And now the resurrection of the Wright debacle threatens Mr. Obama's campaigns in North Carolina, which he is still expected to win, and more particularly in Indiana, where he is in a too-close-to-call race with Ms. Clinton.

His past association with Rev. Wright certainly can't help his campaign woo white, blue-collar voters in that industrial state, however strenuously the senator might denounce the reverend's histrionics.

Mr. Obama took particular offence to Rev. Wright's suggestion, Monday, that Mr. Obama's previous criticisms of his remarks were insincere, born of political necessity.

“If Rev. Wright thinks that that's political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn't know me very well,” he said. “And based on his remarks yesterday, well, I may not know him as well as I thought, either.”

These condemnations of Rev. Wright were immeasurably stronger than Mr. Obama's brief remarks to reporters Monday on the subject. When questioned, he said it was because he had not yet seen a transcript of the remarks or watched the episode at the National Press Club.

Mr. Obama said that he had previously believed that some of the media criticisms of Rev. Wright caricatured his flamboyant style and demeaned his service as a pastor and community leader.

But “yesterday, I think he caricatured himself and … that made me angry, but also made me sad.”