After dancing across the tripwires of race and politics, Gov. Ed Rendell yesterday defended remarks about whether some Pennsylvania voters would reject Illinois Sen. Barack Obama as a presidential candidate because he is black.

"I regret saying it because of the way it was interpreted," the governor said yesterday. "Remember -- I always tell the truth. Maybe I'm wrong, but I tell what my experience has taught me."

What the latest experience has taught him, Mr. Rendell said, is that a blunt answer on a touchy subject doesn't always work.

"What's so frustrating about this is that in this business, if you give an honest answer, you get skewered for it," Mr. Rendell said. "If you give the politically correct answer, the press says, 'Aw, that guy, he's just a shucker and jiver and never gives a straight answer.' I get in trouble for telling the truth."

Race first surfaced as a divisive point in the Democratic nominating contest when former President Bill Clinton suggested that it had been a factor in the South Carolina primary vote for Mr. Obama, who is black.

Last week, in remarks during a meeting with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial board, Mr. Rendell, who has endorsed Mr. Obama's rival, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, triggered the latest round when assessing Pennsylvania's electorate. Saying some Pennsylvanians likely would not vote for a black candidate, he also suggested that race might have accounted for as much as 5 percent of his winning re-election margin over Republican nominee Lynn Swann, who is black.

The governor said: "You've got conservative whites here ... who are not ready to vote for an African American candidate. I believe, looking at the returns in my election, that had Lynn Swann been the identical candidate that he was -- well-spoken, charismatic, good-looking but white instead of black -- that instead of winning by 22 points, I would have won by 17 or so. I think there was that factor there. And that exists, but on the other hand, that's counterbalanced by Obama's ability to bring new voters into the electoral pool."

The comments, which the governor says were more a lamentation than a calculation, sparked a political squall in cyberspace and on cable news channels. Internet posters accused Mr. Rendell of everything from naivete to outright racism.

"This is a pattern," complained one poster on the Web site DailyKos. "Remember, 'He was simply making a historical statement' [alluding to Mr. Clinton's explanation for his South Carolina remarks].The Clintons tried to split the race along racial lines as soon as they looked vulnerable."

Mr. Swann, Pennsylvania's 2006 Republican gubernatorial nominee, yesterday issued a withering criticism of the remarks, calling them "unnecessary, certainly insensitive."

"I think it's obvious that Ed Rendell is looking for a place to support Mrs. Clinton and took an opportunity to make a statement that would be negative toward her opponent," Mr. Swann said. "There's no need for Ed Rendell to make that comment whatsoever, and I think it's arrogant on his part to make the statement that he still would have won by 17 percent."

A clearly rattled Mr. Rendell yesterday took to the airwaves -- he made a point of appearing on MSNBC to explain himself -- and to other media to make clear that he was not attempting to invoke race to the detriment of Mr. Obama.

In an interview with the Post-Gazette, Mr. Rendell cited his own experience in 2006. Some Democrats, he said, would pass along reports of voters refusing to back Mr. Swann because of his color. Sometimes, he said, voters told him as much to his face.

"It made me feel so uncomfortable," he said. "I felt like strangling those people. If I weren't running for office, I probably would have."

Some political observers -- pollsters notable among them -- said the problem was not an assessment of racism, but an attempt to quantify it the way Mr. Rendell did, by estimating an additional 5 percentage points for Mr. Swann if he were white.

"There's no statistical evidence you can cite that puts a percentage the way he did," said G. Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College and supervisor of the Keystone Poll.

The biggest dilemma from the Rendell comments, said Mr. Madonna, is simply the reintroduction of race as a topic in the Democratic primaries a few weeks after the Clinton campaign had tamped down brush fires triggered by the former president's remarks in South Carolina.

The Clinton campaign later backed away from any reference to race, and the former president's role in the nominating campaign was scaled back to avoid any public criticisms of Mr. Obama.

"Politically, you can't believe the Clinton campaign wants this interjected at this point in time into an important Pennsylvania primary," Mr. Madonna said.

The state's highest-ranking African American legislator, state Rep. Dwight Evans, D-Phila., the House Appropriations Committee chairman, yesterday said the controversy made no sense.

"Ed Rendell's just making a very obvious statement," he said. "He's commenting on a reality not just of Pennsylvania, but all of America."

Mr. Evans, who ran for both lieutenant governor and governor, finishing second in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in 1994, said that while he believed some voters will reject black candidates, measuring the effect is difficult.

"Is that a factor? That's always a factor. But you never know to what degree that you are affected. You never know," Mr. Evans said.

Studies as recent as 2004 continue to suggest that some white voters will withhold votes from African Americans, but one study -- a survey of white voters and African American candidates for Congress, conducted by Benjamin Highton of the University of California, Davis -- found that the barrier "does not appear especially daunting, especially in relation to the barrier it is often perceived to be."

Ingrid Reed, a professor at The Eagleton Institute at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said estimating race as a factor in elections is now complicated by the variety of candidates as well as societal shifts.

"The world has gotten very complicated. It's partly a generational issue, and it's partly a perception of competence. In a way, you have an accomplished person in Barack Obama that is slightly different than Mr. Swann, who comes out of an athletic background," she said.

John Zogby, a Utica, N.Y., pollster who did an extensive study of racial prejudice among American voters last summer, said measuring prejudice as a factor in a political contest is hampered by the so-called "Bradley Effect."

That refers to the 1982 California governor contest, in which Tom Bradley, the African American mayor of Los Angeles, showed higher polling numbers than votes received. Since then, pollsters have concluded that voters often will lie about their intentions rather than hint at their own racial bias.

"This is one of the Bermuda Triangles of polling. We do receive socially acceptable responses," Mr. Zogby said.