Chapter Thirteen
The Sleeping Giant
"Race isn't rocket science," one of Barack Obama's friends and law professors, Christopher Edley, used to say. "It's harder." In Obama's campaign for the Presidency, the most persistent of all American problems was a matter of intricate complexity from the first day.
February 10, 2007, was announcement day, in Springfield: what most people remember of that sunny, frigid afternoon is the young candidate in his dark overcoat speaking before the backdrop of the Old State Capitol where Lincoln began his 1858 Senate campaign, a crowd of thousands in the cold, shuffling tightly to keep warm, puffs of vapor rising as they cheered. Admitting to a "certain audacity" in his candidacy, Obama placed himself at the head of a "new generation" during a period of crisis, foreign, domestic, and environmental. He implicitly compared the national mission to that faced by the greatest leaders the country has known:
The genius of our founders is that they designed a system of government that can be changed. And we should take heart, because we've changed this country before. In the face of tyranny, a band of patriots brought an Empire to its knees. In the face of secession, we unified a nation and set the captives free. In the face of Depression, we put people back to work and lifted millions out of poverty. We welcomed immigrants to our shores, we opened railroads to the West, we landed a man on the moon, and we heard a King's call to let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.
It was a typically eloquent performance, but what was hidden, what was left unsaid, was the anxiety of race--not "a King's" call but the continuing enigma of race. Obama was the first African-American running for the Presidency with any chance of winning, and it would have been naive to think that race would fail to insinuate itself into the campaign somewhere along the line. What remains of our story is not the 2008 campaign in its every aspect but rather the story of race in the campaign--a story that was immediately evident on day one.
In planning his announcement speech, Obama had originally wanted Jeremiah Wright, his longtime friend and pastor, to deliver the invocation. A couple of days before the event, however, Obama's aides learned about a forthcoming article in Rolling Stone called "Destiny's Child," in which Wright was described as "a sprawling, profane bear of a preacher," given to "Afrocentric Bible readings." The article, written by a respected young journalist, Benjamin Wallace-Wells, was extremely positive, yet it quoted Wright saying, "Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run! ... We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional KILLERS.... We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.... We conducted radiation experiments on our own people.... We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means! ... And. And. And! GAWD! Has GOT! To be SICK! OF THIS SHIT!"
Wallace-Wells's use of neo-Tom Wolfe punctuation to render the propulsive style of Wright's preaching was not much of an exaggeration. In writing about Wright's importance in Obama's life, Wallace-Wells concluded, "This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King, Jr." Wallace-Wells pointed out that Wright was hardly an "incidental" figure in Obama's life, that Obama himself had described how he "affirmed" his faith in Wright's church and often used his pastor as a "sounding board."
The obvious worry was that voters would assume that Wright's politics and outrage were a mirror of Obama's "true" positions and feelings. Would the campaign have to begin with countless, and perhaps futile, explanations of the role and style of the black church? Would the most promising black candidate for President in American history be derailed by the sermons of Jeremiah Wright? Obama's aides, particularly David Axelrod, were sufficiently alarmed to think that putting Wright up onstage with the candidate on the day of his announcement could kill the candidacy at the moment of its launch. "This is a f*cking disaster," he said to Plouffe and Gibbs. "If Wright goes up on that stage, that's the story. Our announcement will be an asterisk. The Clinton campaign will insure it."
Axelrod, Gibbs, and Plouffe called Obama and appealed to him to talk to Wright. Obama, reluctantly, agreed.
On February 9th, Wright was at Amherst College, in Massachusetts, to attend an interfaith celebration of the life and work of Dr. King. Wright was looking forward to the evening; there was to be a dinner for the Jewish Sabbath and an interfaith service at which he would preach. Early that afternoon, Wright says, he got a call from Obama telling him, "I'm just warning you, because tomorrow, before you say your prayer, we don't want you to say anything that's going to upset anybody in Iowa, because we're leaving there to go to Iowa. Don't want to upset those Iowa farmers. Talk about my experience as a community organizer. I bring different factors to the table. Got it?" A couple of hours later, David Axelrod called Wright and repeated the message: please avoid anything controversial, stick to the script.
Wright thought that was the end of it, but at about four-thirty Obama called again. This time he told Wright, "Rolling Stone has got ahold of one of your sermons, and, you know, you can kind of go over the top at times." He said to Wright that his sermons were sometimes "kind of rough." As Obama spoke, Wright was trying to figure out what was going on. Then Obama made things plain: "So it's the feeling of our people that perhaps you'd better not be out in the spotlight, because they will make you the focus, and not my announcement. Now, Michelle and I still want you to have prayer with us. Can you still come and have prayer, before we go up?"
Wright agreed to stand down from giving the public invocation and to come to Springfield anyway to be with the Obamas. Wright is a prideful man. From almost nothing he had built a church and, over time, attracted thousands of parishioners. This was to be a year of reckoning and triumph; he was, at the age of sixty-six, planning to retire. But now the most famous member of his flock was putting distance between them for reasons he could not yet fathom. Wright says that he wasn't angry--not yet, anyway. He would do whatever Obama asked. Obama had said that he still wanted to represent Trinity at the announcement and asked Wright whether he would object to his calling on the Reverend Otis Moss III, the young minister who was going to replace Wright, to give the invocation.
"We want you to pray with us privately," Obama said, "but can he do the part?"
"Certainly," Wright said. "I'm going to give you his private number, so you can reach him."
According to Wright, he gave Obama the number and hung up, still trying to figure out what sermon Rolling Stone had quoted.
Wright immediately called Reverend Moss, and told him, "I just want you to know, I gave away your private number." He explained why and said Obama would call him soon.
Moss replied that, in fact, one of Obama's top aides had already called and made the request.
"They're trying to drive a wedge between us is what I feel," Moss said. "I'm not going to do that."
Wright was now starting to get angry. "Well, I don't know why he would call," he told Moss. "I hadn't given my permission yet."
Moss said that he barely knew Obama and would rather not give the invocation if it was going to cause a problem with Wright. "I don't feel comfortable with that," he said.
By this time, Wright was agitated. He called two of his four grown daughters, Janet Moore and Jeri Wright, and his wife, Ramah, and said, "Don't look for me on television tomorrow. I'm not doing the invocation."
That night in Amherst, after the Sabbath dinner, Wright delivered a thirty-five-minute sermon at Johnson Chapel that began with the first verses of the Book of Joshua. Wright never mentioned Obama directly and seemed unfazed by what had happened earlier. He described how in the text the Israelites, after forty years of wandering in the desert and the death of Moses, were "standing on the precipice of change" and new leadership. The generation that had been wandering in the desert, he said, had no direct memory of slavery or the battles that came after. They had become divided and forgetful of their history. In a way that was familiar to his parishioners in Chicago, Wright glided in and out of the Biblical text, tying it to the contemporary scene. He said that Dr. King, the great Moses figure, was not the plaster saint of popular memory but, rather, a rebellious minister who opposed "the maniacal menage a trois" of militarism, capitalism, and racism. He lambasted the U.S. government for lying about the war in Iraq and a population that insisted on living in "fantasyland"--"on the corner of Fiction Avenue and Wishful Thinking Boulevard." At the pulpit, Wright betrayed no distress, saying, "I enjoyed the Shabbat shalom dinner with no hot sauce." His sermon was spirited and fluent, a variation on one that he had given many times before. In his performance, there was not a hint of bad feeling.
After the service, Wright drove to Boston, where he slept for three hours. He took an early flight to Chicago and then flew on to Springfield for the announcement speech. At the Old State Capitol, he was led to a holding area with the Secret Service, Richard Durbin, and the Obama family. Wright embraced Michelle Obama and led the family in prayer. When they were finished, Obama went up to the stage and announced his candidacy. During the speech, Wright stood near Michelle.
By the time Wright got back to Chicago, word had begun to spread of how he had been asked to step aside. Jeri Wright told Al Sharpton. Otis Moss III told his father, one of the best-known civil-rights-era ministers. Bad feelings started to brew on all sides. A few days later, Obama spoke with Wright and his daughter Jeri.
"Do you know what it's like to feel that you've been put down by your own church?" he said.
"Do you know what it feels like to have your friend calling Pastor Moss before you got the number from Daddy?" Jeri Wright replied. Jeri also told Obama that his aide had "disrespected" her father.
Obama said that he had meant no disrespect and didn't know that the aide had called Moss before clearing it with the Reverend Wright.
"I know you didn't," Jeri Wright said, according to her father. "But you've got people around you who are doing stuff you don't know about. And, as a matter of fact, you never even heard the sermon that's being printed."
Jeremiah Wright finally determined that the sermon quoted in Rolling Stone had been delivered fourteen years earlier in Washington when the Reverend Bernard Richardson was installed as dean of the chapel at Howard University. Wright says that at that event he wanted to challenge Richardson to lead a prophetic, rather than a priestly, ministry at Howard, "like it was when I was there in '68." He challenged Richardson to be more like the righteous prophet Amos and less like Amaziah, "the priest of the government," more like Dr. King than like Billy Graham. In the full text of Wright's 1993 Howard sermon, he starts out by saying that he wants to "paraphrase" a talk by Tony Campolo, a well-known white pastor who is opposed to same-sex marriage and abortion but generally left-wing. Campolo, who ministered to Bill Clinton in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, is known for his ability to shake his listeners out of a comfortable piety. In one sermon he says, "I have three things I'd like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, thirty-thousand kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don't give a shit. What's worse is that you're more upset with the fact that I said 'shit' than the fact that thirty-thousand kids died last night." Wright had been reading the text of a fiery sermon that Campolo had given to a gathering of white Southern Baptists in which he delineated the continuing inequities and tragedies in so many African-American lives. At the end of the litany, Campolo expressed his outrage at white America. Wright recalled, "And then he says at the end, and we continue to worship in our sanctuaries every week, completely oblivious of these facts. 'And God has got to be sick of this shit.'"
Wright's sermon at Howard was a kind of extended quotation of Campolo. That fact was not included in the Rolling Stone article. And yet the reporter had accurately captured the spirit of Wright's sermon. The full excerpt has Wright angrily reeling off a list of ten outrages, ranging from the undeniable (early U.S. support of apartheid, inequities in the health-care system) to the arguable and the absurd. Wright said in that sermon that the U.S. had practiced "unquestioning" support of Zionism and had accused anyone who supported Palestinian rights of anti-Semitism. Most disturbingly, he repeated the familiar conspiracy theory that the U.S. government had "created" the AIDS virus.
And so, on the day of Obama's announcement, poisonous seeds had been planted; the Rolling Stone article, one would have guessed, would surely inspire a footrace among media outlets and opposition researchers to comb through all of Wright's sermons of the past thirty-five years. The incident also planted a seed of resentment in Wright, an accomplished, sometimes arrogant man who had always seen himself as a trusted mentor to Barack Obama, but who now, in the year of his retirement, would be judged by people and a range of media that, for the most part, were unlettered in the history, complexity, and rhetorical styles of the black church.
The Wright incident was not the only racial controversy being played out on the day of Obama's announcement. Tavis Smiley, one of the most influential African-Americans in television and radio, was angry with Obama because he had scheduled his announcement for that day in Springfield rather than attending Smiley's annual State of the Black Union conference, in Hampton, Virginia, and, perhaps even making the historic news there.
Cornel West, one of the leading black intellectuals at the event and Smiley's close friend and mentor, had great respect for Wright--"I would take a bullet for Jeremiah Wright"--and warned against jumping too soon on the Obama bandwagon. West, a professor of philosophy and religion at Princeton, was born in Tulsa and grew up in Sacramento. A religious Christian and a democratic socialist, he lectures in a style that melds the classroom and the black church. Beyond his academic work, he is a self-described scholar-bluesman, who is on the road with a frequency that challenges B. B. King. When Smiley called on West to speak, West took aim. "Look, Obama is a very decent, brilliant, charismatic brother," he said. "There's no doubt about that. The problem is, is that he's got folk who are talking to him who warrant our distrust. Precisely because we know that him going to Springfield the same day Brother Tavis has set this up for a whole year--we already know then that him coming out there is not fundamentally about us. It's about somebody else. He's got large numbers of white brothers and sisters who have fears and anxieties. He's got to speak to them in such a way that he holds us at arm's length enough to say he loves us, but doesn't get too close to scare them. So he's walking this tightrope, you see what I mean?"
"I want to know, how deep is your love for the people?" West continued. "What kind of courage have you manifested and the stances that you have and what are you willing to sacrifice for? That's the fundamental question. I don't care what color you are. You can't take black people for granted just 'cause you're black."
Another speaker, Lerone Bennett, Jr., a historian and, for many years, the executive editor of Ebony, criticized Obama for announcing his candidacy in Springfield--a platform bound to draw favorable parallels with Lincoln. Bennett's view of Lincoln was almost completely negative, and he drew attention to Lincoln's written and spoken comments on the supposed inferiority of the black man, his support for recolonizing blacks, and his unsentimental attitude toward the slavery issue. Bennett's one-sided view of Lincoln is hardly the consensus view among historians, even on the left--he ignores the political pressures on Lincoln and his contradictory statements about slavery--but he drew applause from an audience that was frustrated with Obama.
Smiley, for his part, told the crowd that Obama had called him on the eve of the conference and said he was sorry that he couldn't come. But the crowd mainly seemed unimpressed, as did Smiley himself.
The one intellectual on the stage in Hampton who defended Obama was Charles Ogletree, who had taught both Barack and Michelle at Harvard Law School. He said he could vouch for Obama's intelligence and good intentions and reminded the crowd that Obama had sponsored a racial-profiling law in the Illinois state legislature and had opposed the war in Iraq well before the invasion. "He's young, he's inexperienced, and the one thing we know from the Scripture is that we fall down, but we get up," Ogletree said. "He might have fallen down today, but we have to be there, with love and appreciation, and say, 'Barack, get up, clean yourself up, we are here for you if you understand who you are.'"
"I was the only one who spoke in defense of him," Ogletree recalled later. "Afterward, Cornel came over to me and said, 'Tree, I didn't know he was your boy! I need to meet him!'"
All these statements won applause in Hampton, but inside the Obama campaign and beyond, they seemed strangely parochial, grandiose, and self-defeating. Even Ogletree, Obama's defender, appeared to condescend to Obama by suggesting that the candidate had "fallen down" by making his announcement a national affair. Obama was so upset by the incident that he talked with his aides about gathering several dozen African-American intellectuals and celebrities to talk about racial issues. His aides were more cautious, saying that such a meeting would attract a lot of press and put race too far forward for a campaign that was determined to be universal in its appeal. Instead, the campaign formed an informal--and not terribly meaningful--advisory council on race that included Cornel West and Charles Ogletree. This was a deft, Johnsonian move whose purpose was to keep as many voices inside the tent as possible. As in the 2004 Senate race, Obama was starting from way behind, even among African-Americans, but Axelrod and Plouffe were counting on his quickly capturing the vast majority of black primary voters in order to narrow the gap between him and Hillary Clinton.
The most persuasive instrument that Obama had for calming the situation was his own voice. At Ogletree's urging, he made a series of telephone calls to West, Smiley, Al Sharpton, and others, and, patiently listening to their concerns, tried to convince them that they were united but had very different, if equally important, roles to play. He told them that they were free to press their ideas and agendas, but he was running for President. Once in office, he could accomplish a great deal. First, though, he had to win. Obama was respectful, telling them that they were speaking out in the tradition of protest, the prophetic tradition, but that as a politician he could not always afford the same liberties.
The situation with Tavis Smiley and Cornel West was especially delicate. Smiley had a large black audience but also a lot of crossover appeal. Smiley, born in Gulfport, Mississippi, grew up in extremely modest circumstances, and, as a young man, he interned for Tom Bradley, the first black mayor of Los Angeles. Beginning in 1996, Smiley had been a commentator on Tom Joyner's popular radio show, and, four years later, he organized the first State of the Black Union meetings. In 2006, he published a best-selling book of political essays, The Covenant with Black America, that featured a kind of action plan to better the lives of African-Americans. Smiley, like West, was concerned that Obama was too much of a centrist or, as they put it, "neoliberal." If he was going to get widespread black support, they insisted, he had to show far greater interest in transformational political change. Smiley says that he "reveled" in Obama's potential as a black President, "but I didn't want him to sell his soul, surrender his soul, or lose his soul in the process of getting there." The question, Smiley says, was, "Are you going to be a truth-teller or a power-grabber? ... If Obama won't lead the country in a conversation about race matters, who will? If you have that conversation only when he's forced to and have a media that is complicit, a media that makes it seem like we live in a post-racial America and with a conservative media that says we should stop all the grievances, well, this is kind of like Alice in Wonderland."
Obama's conversations with Smiley and West were not always smooth, but they were successful. West recalled, "First thing he said was, 'Well, Brother West, you're much more progressive on these things than I am. We're not going to agree on everything.' I said, 'Of course! My only thing is--you be true to yourself, I'll be true to myself.' That's all I ask. Then he went in and talked about what King meant, what that legacy meant, how he'd been shaped by it, and so forth. And it was a genuine opening. That's why I could discern a certain decency. I said, 'Brother, I will be a critical supporter. I'll be a Socratic supporter.'"
Some African-Americans, even friends in the academy, criticized West and Smiley for being presumptuous, high-minded, ignorant of mainstream political realities, and potentially damaging to Obama's campaign. But, with time, the two sides came to understand one another. West agreed to campaign for Obama across the country, and Smiley was a supportive, if critical, voice for Obama on television. Later that year, at a fundraiser at the Apollo Theater, Cornel West introduced Obama with unbridled enthusiasm and Obama returned the flattery, calling West, who had made his life difficult, "a genius" and "an oracle."
Even for an experienced national politician, the process of learning how to run for President, how to balance advice and all the contrary voices bombarding you, isn't easy. And Obama was not experienced. Soon after announcing his candidacy, he read Doris Kearns Goodwin's book on Lincoln, Team of Rivals. The book sold swiftly late in the campaign, because Obama said that he had admired it and because of what it suggested about Lincoln's way of assembling an effectively contentious cabinet, but, now, in the spring of 2007, Obama was still far behind Clinton in the polls. He called Goodwin and said, brightly, "We have to talk." They discussed, above all, the temperamental qualities that Obama admired in Lincoln: his ability to endure defeat and acknowledge error, his capacity to manage his emotions in the heat of the moment, to resist showing anger or dressing down a subordinate in public.
A couple of months after the call, the writer and her husband, Richard Goodwin, who worked in both the Kennedy and the Johnson White House, visited Obama at his Senate office. "The most interesting thing he said was 'I have no desire to be one of those Presidents who are just on the list, you see their pictures lined up on the wall,'" Goodwin recalled. "He said, 'I really want to be a President who makes a difference.' There was the sense that he wanted to be big. He didn't want to be Millard Fillmore or Franklin Pierce."
Goodwin had started out a supporter of Hillary Clinton's; she was steadily won over not merely by Obama's attentions but by his temperament and the way his campaign echoed, for her, the popular spirit and hope of the civil-rights movement. Richard Goodwin helped to write Johnson's pivotal speech after Bloody Sunday, in Selma, on the Voting Rights Act.
Nevertheless, Goodwin said that Obama would have been foolish to make too strong a biographical comparison with Lincoln. "Obama, despite being black in a white world and negotiating the complications of race, never had to feel what Lincoln did. Lincoln was dirt poor and could never go to college. He had all of twelve months of schooling in his life," she said. "Lincoln's father kept pulling him out of school to work the farm, and, when he was in debt, he made his boy work on other farms. Lincoln studied the law on his own at night. Then, there were the deaths. He loses his mother at nine, his sister, and so many more. Death stalked him. Lincoln was drawn to poetry about people who could not realize their talents. Obama would never have had to worry like that. The tragic sense doesn't seem to be there."
Obama and his circle of advisers hoped to carry out their Presidential campaign with only infrequent references to race. He occasionally spoke out on policy issues like incarceration rates and affirmative action but, unlike Jesse Jackson, whose campaigns were rooted in a sense of racial identity, the Obama team was not eager to put ethnicity at the center of the campaign. As he was making his first trips to Iowa, Obama thought about giving a major address on race. He was advised against it. "He would talk about a race speech in planning meetings and people would go, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll get to that,'" Obama's chief speechwriter, Jonathan Favreau, recalled. "They didn't say it was a bad idea, exactly, but it was like, 'Yeah, we'll get to that,' and then forget about it. It got pushed off. I think there was some angst. It's politics. We were a very different campaign but on any campaign there is a traditional pull away from anything risky. He's a black candidate with a real shot--why have him take the risk?"
"He was itching to give it," Valerie Jarrett said. "But I think that the consensus around him was, don't wake up a sleeping giant. We've never had a politician who could have that conversation with the American people in a way that didn't polarize."
Don Rose, the Chicago political strategist who was close to David Axelrod, said that the Obama campaign set out trying to deal with race the way his client Jane Byrne dealt with gender in her campaign for mayor, in 1979. "We never once said anything about her being a woman," Rose said. "I had her dress as plainly as possible. She had bad hair, which had been dyed and dried over a lifetime, and she sometimes had it fixed twice a day. We had her wear a dowdy wig to look as plain as possible. We discouraged feminist organizations from endorsing her. I didn't want the issue of her being a woman to come up in the least. We knew that women who would identify with her, the gender-centric vote, would come our way without anyone raising it. You don't have to highlight what's already obvious."
It was not by accident that Jackson, Sharpton, and other potentially polarizing figures were seen so rarely on platforms with Obama during the campaign. "The rule was: no radioactive blacks," Rose said. "Harold Ford, fine. Jesse Jackson, Jr., fine. But Jesse, Sr., and Al Sharpton, better not." Rose noted that Obama referred to race in his stump speeches infrequently. "When Barack was using that line about how he didn't look like all the other Presidents on American currency, his numbers went down," Rose said. "He got whacked and the campaign noticed. You don't raise it, that's the axiom, and you let it work. The less said, the better."
The Obama campaign took polls on figures like Sharpton and could see that their presence on the campaign trail would be counterproductive. In Iowa, for example, Sharpton had a sixty-per-cent negative rating, and so when he declared that he was coming to the state to campaign in the final days of the caucus race, possibly to endorse Obama, they got the message to him, asking him, politely, to please not bother.
The near absence of Jackson and Sharpton on the campaign was so conspicuous that "Saturday Night Live" lampooned it. In a short animated film, a savvy Obama meets with Jackson for "secret strategy sessions," but only in a broom closet. Obama dispatches Jackson to faraway, imaginary African countries--Lower Zambuta and Bophuthatswana--for "important" missions. He sends Sharpton on a similarly absurd mission, and, when Sharpton returns, he asks gravely, "Al ... how was East Paraguay?"
"Well, it turns out there is no East Paraguay," Sharpton says. "That set me back a month."
In the history of American politics, race has been, in Valerie Jarrett's term, the sleeping giant. The political scientist Tali Mendelberg, in her 2001 book, The Race Card, notes that the white-supremacist resistance to black men and women as political actors, as voters or candidates, began the moment that the slaves were freed. Just after Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, the Democratic Party of Ohio added to its slogan "The Constitution as it is, the Union as it was" the phrase "and the Niggers where they are." When blacks first started running for office, after the Civil War, white Southerners routinely deployed against them all the tropes of the racial grotesque: hyper-sexuality, drunkenness, criminality, idleness, ignorance. It was the Presidential campaign of 1864 in which the parties made their first explicit racial appeals. Speakers at the Democratic Convention mocked "flat-nosed, woolly-headed, long-heeled, cursed of God and damned of man descendants of Africa."
In 1868, Georges Clemenceau, a French journalist who later became prime minister, observed the Democratic Party Convention and reported, "Any Democrat who did not manage to hint that the negro is a degenerate gorilla would be considered lacking in enthusiasm." At that Convention, the Democrats nominated Horatio Seymour, a two-time governor of New York, to run with Francis P. Blair, Jr., a Missouri senator and former Union general, against Ulysses S. Grant. The Seymour-Blair ticket's appeal was thoroughly racist. One of its campaign badges read, "Our Motto: This Is a White Man's Country; Let White Men Rule." Democratic Party-controlled newspapers ran stories of the rape of white women and girls by black men, and Blair berated the Republican Party for yielding the South to "a semi-barbarous race of blacks who are worshippers of fetishes and polygamists."
The speeches, campaign posters, and party newspapers of Reconstruction and Jim Crow were filled with similarly explicit racist appeals that reflected the viciousness of the era. In the United States between 1890 and 1920, there were more lynchings than state-sanctioned executions. James Thomas Heflin, a U.S. senator from Alabama in the nineteen-twenties known as Cotton Tom, said, "The white race is the superior race, the king race, the climax and crowning glory of the four races of black, yellow, red, and white. The South's doctrine of white supremacy is right and it is fast becoming the doctrine of the American Republic."
The period between 1930 and 1960 was a racial battleground, not least within the ranks of the Democratic Party. Southern politicians, like Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, continued to make appeals that were not only racist but incitements to murder: "You and I know what's the best way to keep the nigger from voting. You do it the night before the election. I don't have to tell you any more than that. Red-blooded men know what I mean." During a Senate hearing in 1946, Mississippi's James O. Eastland felt perfectly free to declare, "I know that the white race is a superior race. It has ruled the world. It has given us civilization. It is responsible for all the progress on earth." After the passage of a civil-rights plank at the 1948 Democratic Convention, at which Harry Truman was nominated, the entire Mississippi delegation and half of the Alabama delegation walked out and helped form a splinter party, the Dixiecrats; soon, they put forward Strom Thurmond, of South Carolina, to run for the White House.
Mendelberg writes that, as society changed, racial appeals gradually shifted from the explicit to the implicit. It took Lyndon Johnson, a white Southerner steeped in racial conflict and schooled in the Senate by the Georgian segregationist Richard Russell, to gather strength from the civil-rights movement and issue an explicit warning against racial appeals in American elections. "All they ever hear at election time is 'Negro, Negro, Negro!'" Johnson said in 1964, at a fund-raising dinner in New Orleans. He predicted that passage of the Civil Rights Act would cost the national Democratic Party the South for at least a generation, but explicit racist demagoguery was replaced by appeals that were more cleverly coded. George Wallace dropped slogans like "Segregation today, segregation forever" and called on his followers to awaken to the threat of a "liberal-Socialistic-Communist design to destroy local government in America."
In 1968, the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, and his running mate, Spiro Agnew of Maryland, used the code of "law and order" to insure themselves of a solid white voting bloc in the South. Nixon, who was completely aware of the signals that he was sending, was first drawn to Agnew when the former Maryland governor denounced moderate black leaders for failing to "stand up" to militants. After filming a commercial about law and order in the schools during the campaign, Nixon said, "Yep, this hits it right on the nose.... It's all about law and order and the damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there."
As late as the nineteen-eighties, the Republican Party's two leading figures, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, made unmistakable, if implicit, racial appeals during their campaigns. On August 3, 1980, Reagan launched his general election campaign with a speech at the Neshoba County Fair, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town where three civil-rights workers--James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner--were murdered by white supremacists during the 1964 voter-registration drives known as Freedom Summer. By delivering a speech in Philadelphia emphasizing his support of "state's rights," Reagan was making, at best, an insensitive and knowing appeal to George Wallace Democrats--an attempt to broaden what Nixon called the "Southern strategy."
In the 1988 Presidential campaign, in which Bush ran against Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, he and his campaign manager, Lee Atwater, repeatedly seized on the case of William Horton, a murderer who was released on a furlough by Governor Dukakis while serving a life sentence. During the furlough, Horton committed an armed robbery and rape. Bush supporters ran commercials showing Horton, an African-American, as the threatening side of Democratic policy. (The commercial called him Willie Horton.) Bush pressed the Horton case with such passion that, Atwater said, "by the time this election is over, Willie Horton will be a household name." Bush's media consultant, Roger Ailes, who later became the president of the Fox News Channel, cracked, "The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it."
It was hard to believe that Hillary Clinton would indulge in racial appeals of any kind. One of her dearest memories as a high-school student was going to hear Dr. King speak. She worked closely with civil-rights-era figures like Marian Wright Edelman and Vernon Jordan, attracted support from leading black politicians, and relied for advice on Maggie Williams, Minyon Moore, Cheryl Mills, and other black political operatives. The Clintons--Bill, especially--were at ease in black churches and black civic organizations and as a political family they were immensely popular in the African-American community. No group was more forgiving of Bill Clinton during his impeachment saga than African-Americans. In 2008, Hillary Clinton's aides were hoping that she would be able to hold on to around half the African-American vote in the primaries and then sweep it up almost entirely in a general election campaign.
From the start, the leading strategist in her campaign urged her to emphasize Obama's otherness. On December 21, 2006, Mark Penn--a pollster, public-relations executive, and longtime strategist for the Clintons--distributed a memorandum on "launch strategy." The goal, he wrote, was to elect the "fwp"--the first woman President--despite a "relatively hostile media" eager to anoint "someone 'new' who can be their own." A resentful attitude toward the press was a longstanding fact of life in Clinton circles dating back to the days of the 1992 campaign--and not without reason. The wounds of Filegate, Travelgate, Whitewater, the impeachment, and much else persisted as a fact of psychological life. Even in retirement, the former President, as he worked mainly on his charitable foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, sometimes let loose his rage at the press and other old enemies; a stray comment or mild question could set him off and Clinton's face would redden, his carotid artery engorge, as he re-engaged old arguments with his antagonists. His wife's election campaign represented a chance for redemption. Would Obama stand in the way of that chance?
Mark Penn wrote that he saw Obama as a "serious challenge" and counseled a cool head: "Research his flaws, hold our powder, see if he fades or does not run. Attacking him directly would backfire. His weakness is that if voters think about him five minutes they get that he was just a state senator and that he would be trounced by the big Republicans." His support came from a "Brie and cheese set" that "drives fund-raising and elite press but does not drive the vote. Kerry beat Dean. Gore easily defeated Bradley."
Three months later, on March 19, 2007, both Obama and Clinton were in the race, and Penn wrote another memo that distinguished between the two candidates primarily on the basis of class: "We are the candidate of people with needs. We win women, lower classes, and Democrats (about 3 to 1 in our favor). Obama wins men, upper class, and independents (about 2 to 1 in his favor)." Penn called on Clinton to be the champion of "the invisible Americans" and attempted to establish an iconic distinction between Obama and Clinton: "He may be the J.F.K. in the race, but you are the Bobby." In this dichotomy, J.F.K. represented an entitled, intelligent, elite, cool politician, R.F.K. a man of privilege who had come to identify most closely with the dispossessed--the whites of Appalachia, the Hispanic immigrants of Southern California, Texas, and Florida, the blacks of the inner city. Obama, too, had spoken of the inspiration of R.F.K.'s 1968 Presidential campaign and the coalitions that it had created before his death, but Penn seemed convinced that Hillary Clinton could best summon that romantic, yet tragic, past.
Penn's memo did not necessarily represent the strategy and psychology of the candidate herself. Clinton's campaign was, in fact, top-heavy with veteran advisers--Harold Ickes, Mandy Grunwald, Howard Wolfson, Patti Solis Doyle--and they generally loathed Penn, seeing him as cynical, pompous, and profoundly mistaken. To them, he was forever the associate of Dick Morris, the centrist operative who left the Clinton circle in disgrace, in 1996, after the tabloids published reports of his involvement with a prostitute. Ickes, who had been an activist in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, Solis Doyle, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, and others counseled greater caution than Penn, particularly on the question of race, and felt that his memos encouraged the candidate to go far beyond the bounds of brass-knuckle campaigning. Penn made no secret of the fact that he was more conservative than the rest of Hillary's team; what he resented was his need to win consensus from advisers who, he felt, were constantly undermining him.
"It's clear that they resisted a lot of his more sinister suggestions," David Plouffe recalled. Nevertheless, Penn's memo accurately reflected the resentful attitude toward Obama that reporters were noticing in Hillary Clinton's camp both before and during the campaign. Clinton and key advisers felt that Obama was an inexperienced, unschooled upstart, a novice with a talent for public speaking (as long as he was within range of a teleprompter). Obama, they believed, was relying almost solely on his speech-making abilities and the historically glamorous prospect of becoming the first black President.
In the March 19th memo, Penn suggested that the Clinton campaign target Obama's "lack of American roots." Using that supposed rootlessness, they could cast his candidacy as something fit only for the distant future. "All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light," he wrote. "Save it for 2050."
"It also exposes a very strong weakness for him--his roots in basic American values and culture are at best limited," Penn's memo continued. "I cannot imagine America electing a President during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values. He told the people of N.H. yesterday he has a Kansas accent because his mother was from there. His mother lived in many states as far as we can tell--but this is an example of the nonsense he uses to cover this up."
Penn counseled Clinton on how the campaign could "give some life" to these notions "without turning negative":
Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century. And talk about the basic bargain as about the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child and that drive you today. Values of fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back.
Let's explicitly own "American" in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn't. Make this a new American Century, the American Strategic Energy fund. Let's use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let's add flag symbols to the backgrounds.
We are never going to say anything about his background--we have to show the value of ours when it comes to making decisions, understanding the needs of most Americans--the invisible Americans.
"The invisible Americans" sounded a great deal like Nixon's "silent majority." Penn's strategy was to cast Obama as the candidate of the elite, a "phony," a neophyte, and an outsider--not quite as American as Hillary Clinton. Long after the race, Penn said to me that the memo "was not in any way, shape, or form meant to have any racial overtones. It was about the notion that [Obama's] childhood in Indonesia somehow better qualified him to manage international affairs--a fact he had repeatedly touted on the campaign trail."
Within the campaign, there was debate about Penn's tactics and an overall reluctance to highlight Obama's "otherness." But what could be expected of Bill Clinton, who had recovered from quadruple bypass surgery and was planning to campaign? Clinton had grown up in segregated Arkansas, comfortable in his relationships with black men and women. At Yale Law School he often made a point of sitting at the "black table" in the dining hall. Clinton's first adversary as a politician was James (Justice Jim) Johnson, a Klan-supported Democrat turned Republican who ran twice for governor and once for the Senate; Johnson was to the right of Orval Faubus, the infamous segregationist. As President, Clinton defended affirmative action, appointed African-Americans to his Cabinet, awarded Medals of Honor to black veterans whose heroism had been ignored, and apologized for the horrific Tuskegee syphilis experiment conducted on hundreds of black sharecroppers from 1932 to 1972. He delivered a number of speeches admired by the black leadership in Congress and cultivated friendships with leading civil-rights veterans like John Lewis, Andrew Young, and John Hope Franklin.
And yet Clinton was a politician to the core, a brilliant one, and sometimes a cynical one. Winning came first. During the 1992 campaign, in the midst of the Gennifer Flowers controversy and under attack as a Democrat "soft on crime," he flew to Arkansas and, to bolster his law-and-order bona fides, presided over the execution of a mentally handicapped black prisoner named Ricky Ray Rector, who, eleven years earlier, had killed a police officer. Then, attempting suicide, Rector shot himself in the head, in effect giving himself a lobotomy. The same year, Clinton accepted an invitation to speak at Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, in Washington, D.C., and then used the occasion to criticize the hip-hop performer Sister Souljah for a foolish comment she had made about black violence. ("If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?") With his host sitting nearby, Clinton compared Sister Souljah to the former Klansman David Duke and criticized Jackson for allowing her to be a member of his organization. It was a performance that infuriated Jackson but appealed to Reagan Democrats--as Clinton undoubtedly intended. "I can maybe work with him, but I know now who he is, what he is," Jackson said of Clinton at the time. "There's nothin' he won't do. He's immune to shame. Move past all the nice posturing and get really down there in him, you find absolutely nothing ... nothing but an appetite." Eventually, Jackson forgave him.
In 1997, President Clinton initiated a "conversation" on race, led by John Hope Franklin, but it was a pallid, ceremonial affair, which disillusioned some black critics. "The initiative displayed the parochial, shallow self-servingness that besmirches all too much of Clinton's talk about race relations," the Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy wrote. "Portrayed as an effort at dialogue, the President's conversation was from the beginning a tightly scripted monologue that regurgitated familiar nostrums while avoiding discussing real problems." Compared with commissions on race under Harry Truman in 1946 and Lyndon Johnson in 1967, Kennedy said, Clinton's effort was "laughable."
In the long months before the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, a generational drama played out among some of the most important figures in the civil-rights generation--a drama that reflected the dilemma of many ordinary African-Americans who were faced with a choice between Hillary Clinton and Obama.
Some made their choice without hesitation. Vernon Jordan, an attorney who had been president of the National Urban League, and who became a close adviser and friend of the Clintons, had given an early fundraiser for Obama's Senate campaign. But, before Obama announced for the Presidency, Jordan invited him to his house for dinner and told him, "Barack, I am an old Negro who believes that to everything there is a season--and I don't think this is your season.... If you do run, as I think you will, I will be with Hillary. I am too old to trade friendship for race. But, if you win, I will be with you."
Andrew Young, one of Martin Luther King's close advisers and, later, a mayor, a congressman, and Ambassador to the United Nations, was far less subtle about his loyalties. Speaking on television in December, 2007, Young said that he wanted Obama to be President--but only "in 2016." In a strange ramble for such a serious man, Young warned about Obama's lack of "maturity" and the need for a "protective network."
"It's like somebody wanting to be the next Martin Luther King," Young said. "They say, I wouldn't wish that on a friend of mine. Martin's home got bombed the first year, they took all his money the second year, and sued him for income-tax evasion. He got stabbed the third year. The fourth year, he came to Atlanta to try to escape from Alabama. They locked him up for picketing ... and put him in a straitjacket, and took him from Atlanta to Reedsville before there were expressways.... Leadership requires suffering, and I would like to see Barack's children get a little older, see, because they're going to pick on them."
Young even went on about Bill Clinton's racial bona fides as a reason to vote for Hillary. "Bill is every bit as black as Barack," he said. "He's probably gone out with more black women than Barack. I'm clowning, but, when they went to Nelson Mandela's inauguration, they had a whole planeload of black folk who went down there. After the inauguration, there was a party. And Clinton was the one that said, 'Let's start a soul-train line.' All these middle class, bougie folk looked around, 'A soul-train line?' And Bill did the moonwalk in the soul train.... And Hillary pulled her skirt up above her knees, and she got down and went through too.... You look at Barack's campaign, and, first of all, I've talked to people in Chicago, and they don't know anybody around him. To put a brother in there by himself is to set him up for crucifixion."
Young eventually apologized, but his rhetorical flight did betray some commonly held anxieties about Obama--anxieties not only about his inexperience but also about his safety and about his authenticity as an African-American. Yet again in the life of Barack Obama, there were the old questions: Was he black enough? Was he ready? Was he tough enough?
Among all the living heroes of civil rights, the figure whom Obama admired most was John Lewis. At first, Lewis had signaled broadly to Obama that he would support him. Even though Obama had come to Washington only in January, 2005, the two men had formed a bond. That year, Obama went to Atlanta to speak at Lewis's sixty-fifth-birthday party.
Lewis was astonished by Obama's post-Boston appeal. "We walked the streets of Atlanta together and blacks and whites were asking him to run for President," Lewis recalled. "When we got to the restaurant, the waiters and waitresses were asking him to run. And when I introduced him that night I said, 'One day this man will be the President of the United States.'"
At the Selma speech in March, 2007, Obama felt confident that Lewis would be for him, but through the summer and into the early autumn, the Clintons kept appealing to Lewis on the basis of their long shared history.
"I've known Bill Clinton for so long--it was more than friendship, it was like a brotherly relationship.... And when Hillary would come to Georgia to speak, she would say, 'When I grow up I want to be like John Lewis,'" Lewis says. Lewis's bond with the Clinton family deepened at their worst moment. In August, 1998, after Bill Clinton went on television to admit to his relationship with Monica Lewinsky--an unprecedented humiliation--Lewis invited him to Union Chapel, on Martha's Vineyard, to commemorate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the March on Washington. "He didn't want to come, but I convinced him," Lewis recalled. "And, when the time came, I got up to introduce him and said, 'Mr. President, I was with you in the beginning and I will be with you in the end.' We both cried.... How could I abandon a friend like that?"
In October, 2007, Lewis finally came down on the side of the Clintons--there was just too much history to overlook. Lewis is one of the most principled figures in government, but there were also political considerations. Lewis represents the Atlanta area, a majority-black district, and Obama was not yet as well known or as popular as the Clintons among his constituents. "They didn't know him (a), and (b), they thought it was a long shot," Jesse Jackson said. "Black voters are comparatively conservative and practical." In 1984, Jackson had also struggled to get support from African-Americans who didn't think he had a chance.
For John Lewis, it was an agonizing time. Even before the Iowa caucuses, he was beginning to realize that Obama's candidacy was becoming increasingly serious and that his constituents were shifting away from Clinton. "If I had gone maybe with my gut," he said, "I probably would have gone with Obama from the outset."
The dilemma was plain. "These were people who knew Bill and Hillary and thought well of them and couldn't quite believe that this young guy with a foreign name had a chance to get elected," the civil-rights activist Julian Bond said. "After two Jackson campaigns, after Al Sharpton's campaign, after Shirley Chisholm, it seemed that these symbolic races hadn't delivered much. The promise had been that these candidates would extract some kind of benefits from the winners and the black cause would be advanced. That turned out to be less true than they had hoped."
Some civil-rights leaders did side with Obama early. The Reverend Joseph Lowery, a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a leader of the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, told an audience in Atlanta in January, 2007, that "a slave mentality" still haunted those African-Americans who had counseled Obama to wait his turn. He compared those who discouraged Obama to the white ministers who told Martin Luther King, a half century ago, that the time was not ripe for civil dissent. "Martin said the people who were saying 'later' were really saying 'never,'" Lowery said. "The time to do right is always right now." A resident of John Lewis's district, Lowery signed on immediately with the Obama campaign.
When Lowery heard the news about Lewis's decision, he was just relieved he wasn't a politician. "John wasn't a civil-rights leader anymore, he was a politician, he had relationships and entanglements," Lowery said. "I told the Clintons that if Hillary got the nomination, I would support her, but, in the meantime, I felt Obama was destined to shake up the system."
Not that every black political or cultural leader was so understanding. The director Spike Lee, whose films include "Do the Right Thing" and a biopic of Malcolm X, was brutally dismissive of those who wavered. "These old black politicians say, 'Ooh, Massuh Clinton was good to us, massuh hired a lot of us, massuh was good!' Hoo!" he said. "Charlie Rangel, David Dinkins--they have to understand this is a new day. People ain't feelin' that stuff. It's like a tide, and the people who get in the way are just gonna get swept out into the ocean."
Similarly, not everyone in the Obama campaign was quite as forgiving of older black leaders like Lewis as the candidate himself. "Movements are led by the young," the pollster Cornell Belcher said, "and it was comical that the same people who were in their twenties during the civil-rights movement and demanded a seat at the table were now telling Barack Obama it wasn't his time."
Jesse Jackson, who also sided early with Obama, is an American character of emotional complexity, glaring weaknesses, and, far more than he is ordinarily given credit for, immense importance in the political advance of African-American politicians, including Barack Obama.
Jackson's flaws--his conceits, his neediness--are so well known that he is readily dismissed by those who do not bother to understand him. George H. W. Bush once called him a "Chicago hustler." Even Martin Luther King, who, in Selma, brought Jackson close, raged against Jackson's need to thrust himself forward. Mario Cuomo, however, may have been right to say that when the definitive history of the 1984 election was finally written, "the longest chapter will be on Jackson."
"The man didn't have two cents," Cuomo said. "He didn't have one television or radio ad. And look at what he did." What Jackson did was to run the most serious Presidential campaign ever conducted by an African-American--a feat that he repeated in 1988. Even the Chicagoans in Obama's circle who are most dismissive of Jackson admit that he opened the door for them to the White House. Roger Wilkins worked for Jackson in 1984, he said, not because he thought he could win but, rather, to give the country a "civics lesson that there are black people in this country smart enough to be President of the United States."
Obama might have been wary of Jackson's presence in the campaign, but he could not escape his influence. In 2007 and 2008, when Obama quoted from King's speeches--quoted them with the same sense of reverence as a jazz musician quoting a passage in Armstrong or Coltrane--this was something fresh and affecting for younger voters. But it was hardly new. "When you are unkind to the homeless, disparaging them as derelicts, you on treacherous moral ground, Mr. Bush," Jackson said in the 1988 campaign. "'cause there is another power. 'The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.' Those who cannot defend themselves, they got a silent partner, they got ... got another power. And when you, when you attack liberals, good-hearted folks, lovers of civil liberties, Mr. Bush--Mr. Bush, watch out! You tamperin' with another power!" Jackson had a distinctively different style from Obama, but the sources of their inspiration converged.
Jackson did not intend merely to quote the prophetic voice of King for political purposes; he spoke in that voice because it was his own. Jackson pushed issues that were not always permissible in mainstream politics in 1984 and 1988, including Palestinian rights and opposition to South African apartheid. He received so many death threats that he often wore a bulletproof vest when he gave a speech.
Jackson did not have access to places like Punahou, Columbia, and Harvard. He was born and reared in segregated Greenville, South Carolina, a textile-mill town. His family had Cherokee and Irish blood. "We are a hybrid people," he said. "We are of African roots, with a little Irish, German, Indian. We are made up of America's many waters. Which makes us a new people, a true American people."
Jackson's father abandoned him before he was born, though he continued to live nearby. "I never slept under the same roof with my natural father one night in my life," Jackson has said. When he spoke on the campaign trail, he would talk about his deprived upbringing as the unassailable mark of his authenticity, the basis of his relationship to the poor and dispossessed. "You know, people'd always ask why is Jesse Jackson running for the White House," he would say. "They never seen the house I'm running from. Three rooms, tin-top roof, no hot or cold running water, slop jar by the bed, bathroom in the backyard in the wintertime. Wood over the windows, wallpaper put up not for decoration but to keep the wind out ... In ways, it seems like a century ago ... Yet I remain connected to all this. By continuing to live in those experiences here, you have high-octane gas in your tank--keep those experiences flowing through your soul, it gives you authenticity." When Jesse was a boy, Marshall Frady writes in his biography of Jackson, people still talked about the lynching of an epileptic black youth named Willie Earl; that murder was the subject of Rebecca West's classic essay "Opera in Greenville."
As a child in Greenville, Jackson was mocked by his schoolmates without mercy. "Jesse ain't got no daddy," they chanted. "Jesse ain't got no daddy." It was a Dickensian world of hurt transported to the segregated American South. "That's why I have always been able to identify with those the rest of society labels as bastards, as outcasts and moral refuse," he told Marshall Frady. "I know people saying you're nothing and nobody and can never be anything. I understand when you have no real last name. I understand. Because our very genes cry out for confirmation."
Greenville was a small town in those days and young Jesse would stealthily follow his father around town, spying on him, all the while wondering why he was denied his love. When he came to Greenville to give his first sermon as a preacher in his mother's church, both Charles Jackson, his mother's husband, and Noah Robinson, his birth father, were there, sitting in the front. For several minutes he just stood there in silence, tears streaming down his cheeks, looking down at his stepfather and the father who had disowned him.
In his twenties, Jackson became such a loyal acolyte of Martin Luther King, Jr., that he almost named his first son, who was born in 1965, Selma. When he was arrested and briefly imprisoned at demonstrations in Greensboro, North Carolina, he wrote, in imitation of King, "Letter from a Greensboro Jail."
Jackson's ambition was equal to his passion. In Selma, in 1965, when he was just twenty-four, he quickly made himself known around Brown Chapel; he pushed his way to the front of marches. Unasked, he would give speeches from the steps of the church that imitated King's language and cadences, offending Andrew Young and other King lieutenants. "Jesse wanted to be Martin," Ralph Abernathy recalled.
Jackson alienated some of his civil-rights comrades when, in the days after Dr. King's assassination, he wore a shirt smeared with King's blood, a sign both of his grief and of his inheritance. Within days of King's death, he was wondering aloud whether he would now become the leader of the black freedom struggle. Jackson ascended rapidly in the world of African-American politics, making the cover of Time in 1970, but he also cemented his reputation, in some quarters, as a self-interested publicity hound, forever inserting himself into every high-profile domestic funeral and foreign negotiation. In 1983, Harold Washington did everything he could to avoid a too close association with Jackson during his campaign for City Hall. On victory night Washington was irritated when Jackson tried to hoist his arm in victory.
It was Harold Washington's triumph, however, that helped give Jackson the idea that he could run for President in 1984. And the pictures of him campaigning in the nearly all-white communities of Iowa forever altered the imagery of American politics. "They'd never seen a black man in the cornfields before," Jackson said. One night, Jackson was talking with some older farmers in Iowa and they told him that they had heard him speak, and liked him, but "we're not quite there yet. But don't give up on us."
In 1984, Jackson won nearly a fifth of all votes cast in the Democratic primaries and won South Carolina, Louisiana, and Washington, D.C.; in 1988, he won nine states and Washington, D.C. Two decades later, the children of those Iowa farmers had come along even further. They'd been brought up in schools where they learned about the civil-rights movement. They'd been brought up watching black and white athletes competing together. They pinned up posters of black athletes and musicians. Their popular culture was, in large measure, African-American popular culture. America was hardly the post-racial paradise imagined in some fantastical press accounts, but things had changed, and Jackson's candidacies in 1984 and 1988 had been essential in preparing the ground.
"My father's generation came out of World War II when returning black soldiers didn't have the same rights on the military bases that lots of German P.O.W.s had," Jackson says. "Barack once told me that when he was at Columbia as a student, he saw me debate Walter Mondale and Gary Hart there"--in March, 1984--"and he said he watched this and thought, This thing can happen." Jackson said that "the whole idea" of his Presidential campaign was "to plant seeds."
Mainline politicians, black and white, criticized Jackson for his ego and his presumption, but his Convention speeches were anthologized alongside those of William Jennings Bryan and Mario Cuomo, and he got credit both for registering two million African-American voters and for changing the sense of the possible.
The first time Jackson ever heard of Obama was in his kitchen when his children were talking about Obama's efforts in Project Vote. Of course, he knew Michelle Obama from her childhood friendship with his daughter Santita. In the 2000 congressional campaign, Jackson had supported his old comrade Bobby Rush, but four years later during the Senate run, he was for Obama. The two men were never close--Jackson's pride and Obama's desire to be a different kind of leader prevented that--but at the East Bank Club, the downtown gym and hitching post for the Chicago elite, Jackson and Obama had occasionally talked about politics, and Obama sometimes spoke at Jackson's Saturday-morning meetings at Operation PUSH.
Jackson supported Obama in his run for the White House but he also understood why John Lewis, Andrew Young, and many other black politicians of his generation supported Hillary at first. "They had relationships," he said. "They'd known Hillary longer, they'd known Bill longer. No more, no less. And they believed Hillary would win. They thought they were betting on a winning horse. It was not anti-Obama. They didn't even know who he was, really. He'd never worked with us and dealt with blackness in Mississippi. She'd been with Marian Wright Edelman, working in legal-defense work. Hillary had a track record. Whatever his work was as a community organizer and all that, it's not as long and deep as Hillary's. She worked in the Arkansas Delta, the Mississippi Delta, and then eight years in the White House, and the work in Africa--I mean, there's a long list of accomplishments, and some people, as Vernon Jordan has said, do not switch horses without a reason that is compelling."
Nevertheless, once the Presidential campaign began, Jackson was not hesitant to show his displeasure with Obama when, in his judgment, he failed to speak out on racial issues. During a prolonged and ugly racial conflict at a school in the small town of Jena, Louisiana, Obama did not join a march--and Jackson let him hear about it. "If I were a candidate, I'd be all over Jena," Jackson said at the time. According to a South Carolina paper, Jackson thought that Obama, in his restraint, was "acting like he's white." Looking back, Jackson says he felt that Jena was an emblematic case in a country where there are over two million prisoners, nearly half of them black. "I thought it was the moment to send a statement about a change in criminal justice," he says. "Barack apparently did not want to be openly identified with that. But one can disagree with one's friends without jumping off a bridge. It wasn't no deal-breaker."
Barack Obama does not easily betray his emotions, but he was deeply disappointed that black leaders did not rally to him in greater numbers. John Lewis's decision to side with Hillary, in particular, felt like a stab in the back, he confided to aides. But in Iowa he was engaged in a much more immediate project--proving himself capable of winning white votes. "If Barack doesn't win Iowa, it's just a dream," Michelle said, in September, 2007. As Obama campaigned in the state and his remarkably devoted and well-organized network of young campaign workers outpaced their rivals, his appeal was looking less like Jesse Jackson's in 1984 and more like Gary Hart's. His most active support came from what strategists call "better-educated, upper-status whites," mainly college-educated, younger people who appreciated his outspoken opposition to the invasion of Iraq when he was still a state senator.
Oprah Winfrey endorsed Obama--the first time she had ever endorsed a Presidential candidate--and started to campaign in the early primary states. She threw him a dinner at her estate in Montecito, California, and invited Stevie Wonder, Tyler Perry, Quincy Jones, and other members of the black elite in show business, finance, and academia. Where Oprah Winfrey helped most, however, was with ordinary people. Her appeal transcended race, reaching huge numbers of middle-class, lower-middle-class, and working-class women, white and black.
With the Iowa caucuses getting closer, one could sense the panic in the Clinton ranks. Bill Clinton went on the "Charlie Rose Show" on December 14th and tried to plant the idea that Obama's election would be an enormous risk. "I mean, when is the last time we elected a President based on one year of service in the Senate before he started running?" Clinton said. "When I was a governor and young and thought I was the best politician in the Democratic Party, I didn't run the first time"--a reference to the 1988 campaign. "I knew in my bones I shouldn't run. I was a good enough politician to win, but I didn't think I was ready to be President." Inside the Clinton campaign, one former adviser said, "they were beyond furious"; they were convinced that the press was enamored of Obama and the narrative of an African-American candidate beating an entrenched machine. "Bill, especially, had to confront mortality," the former aide said. "They had once been young and romantic, but it's hard for a machine to be romantic. Their coverage had been good until November, December, 2007, but when it turned, it turned hard."
The Obama-Clinton race was historic for reasons of both race and gender, but, while Obama was able to adopt the language, cadences, imagery, and memories of the civil-rights movement and graft it onto his campaign, giving it the sense of something larger, a movement, Clinton never did the same with the struggle for women's rights. Clinton herself resisted it. Some inside the Clinton campaign later admitted that they were late to see the potency of Obama and race, and to realize the cost of their failure to connect the fight for women's rights to Clinton's candidacy and, thereby, enhance its power.
"We were just too late with gender," one of her senior aides said. "Also, in the minds of so many people, especially the press and the cognoscenti, Hillary had this hard, tough, anything-goes political ethos. She was branded that way, and that diminished her cachet and luster as the first real woman candidate for President. People saw something tawdry in her brass-knuckle political sense. She was battered and tarnished coming out of the White House years. She was the wicked witch. It is a cliche by now, but political toughness in a man is not criticized the way it is in a woman."
On January 3, 2008, Obama won the Iowa caucuses in commanding fashion. Hillary Clinton came in third behind John Edwards. The opening strains of Obama's victory speech that night were emblematic of the way that he treated race throughout the campaign. Amid the cheering in Des Moines, he began:
You know, they said this day would never come. They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose. But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn't do.... We are one people. And our time for change has come!
An astonishing set of rhetorical gestures: Obama called on the familiar cadences and syntax of the black church, echoing Jesse Jackson's more overt lines: "Hands that picked cotton can now pick presidents: Our time has come!" He gestured toward what everyone was thinking about--the launching of a campaign that could lead to the first African-American President. Jon Favreau, Obama's speechwriter, said that the two of them were immersed in all of King's rhetoric, in the two Lincoln inaugurals, and in Robert Kennedy's 1968 campaign speeches. The opening of the Iowa speech--"they said this day would never come"--deliberately echoed King, but it was not explicitly racial; it was a way of intensifying a universalist purpose with a specific, historical ring. "I knew that it would have multiple meanings to multiple people," Favreau said.
Obama went on, "This was the moment when we tore down barriers that have divided us for too long. When we rallied people of all"--wait for it--"parties and ages." The displacement was deft and effective. The listener knew that he meant racial barriers--we could feel it--but the invocation was more powerful for being unspoken. The key pronoun was always "we," or "us." The historical fight for equal rights came only at the end of a peroration on national purpose:
Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire; what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation; what led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom's cause. Hope--hope is what led me here today.
In Obama's speech the civil-rights struggle was recast in terms not of national guilt but of national progress: the rise of the Joshua generation, black and white, red and yellow. The black freedom struggle became, in Obama's terms, an American freedom struggle.
African-Americans watched Obama's victory speech in Des Moines with a sense of wonder. By winning Iowa and performing that night with such eloquence and force, Obama had proved that he had a chance, and now the black vote started to migrate steadily in his direction. A coalition of antiwar whites and blacks--perhaps something even wider than that--was now conceivable.
The tableau of Obama's victory-night speech, the television picture of him standing there with his family, also had a deep emotional impact. "Iowa was amazing," said Cliff Kelley, a leading host on WVON, the black talk-radio station in Chicago that had promoted Obama so heavily in recent years. "When Barack came out onstage with his wife and two gorgeous daughters, all of them looking like they were out of central casting, there were only five black people there in the room. Them and me." Until that moment, how many African-Americans--how many Americans--allowed themselves to believe that a black President was possible? Had the world really changed that much?
"It was only after Iowa, that they began to say, Oh my Lord, this could happen," Julian Bond said. "With Iowa you saw Obama could get white votes in the whitest of states. That made it all seem possible."
Iowa crushed Hillary Clinton's dream of an unstoppable juggernaut and endangered her candidacy. The New Hampshire primary was to take place five days later, and she was trailing in the state. But when she pulled out a victory there, both sides recognized that they were in for a long campaign.
Once more Jeremiah Wright came along to complicate things for Barack Obama. The Nevada caucus was to be held on January 19th, and, just before, Wright declared that the idea that the Clintons had been a friend to African-Americans when they were in the White House was preposterous. Bill Clinton, he said, "did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky."
Once more Obama was forced to distance himself from his minister. "As I've told Reverend Wright, personal attacks such as this have no place in this campaign or our politics," he said in a statement. "That doesn't distract from my affection for Reverend Wright or appreciation for the good works he's done."