President Obama acknowledged that handling the controversy surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright during his campaign was a potential make-or-break matter, The Washington Post reported.

“If we had not handled the Reverend Wright episode properly,” the president said, “I think we could have lost.”

Obama’s comments in a post-election interview were included in an adaptation of the forthcoming book “The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election.”

He told the authors, Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson, that he knew he had to address the issue of race head-on after racially charged snippets of Wright’s sermons at the church Obama had attended were looped on newscasts and the Internet.

“What you had was a moment where all the suspicions and misunderstandings that are embedded in our racial history were suddenly laid bare,” Obama told them.