Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco, reported Saturday that President Barack ObamaBecause I won...
held a semi-secret conference call with the racist preacher Jeremiah Wright and other ministers last weekend to boost African-American turnout. But Obama for America campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith denied it flatly to The Daily Caller on Sunday.
"It is not true," Smith, the campaign's rapid-response director, wrote in an email to TheDC.
Brown reported his claim in his San Francisco Chronicle column Saturday evening,
Pressed on whether Wright has "engaged any campaign activity with President B.O. over the last two months," Smith replied, "He has not. The story is totally incorrect."
Brown's claim of a secret outreach effort to a group of black religious figures including Obama's former pastor came with a parallel claim that anti-black racism will drop Obama's Election Day results by roughly 4 percentage points below pre-election polls.
"By my estimate, you have to build in a three- to five-point slip from the poll numbers for any black candidate on Election Day ... [so] you need to pump up the black vote by equal measure," he wrote in his Oct. 20 column.