Chapter Fourteen
In the Racial Funhouse
In October, 2000, Anton Gunn, a community organizer in South Carolina and a former offensive lineman for the University of South Carolina Gamecocks, traveled to Arlington National Cemetery to bury his younger brother Cherone. A twenty-two-year-old Navy signalman, Cherone Gunn was among the seventeen crewmen of the U.S.S. Cole who were killed when Al Qaeda attacked the ship in the port of Aden, in Yemen. Cherone's father, Louge, a career Navy officer, and his mother, Mona, an elementary-school principal, wept as Anton knelt over his brother's flag-draped coffin and spoke softly to it, as if to someone half asleep. "I told him that I loved him," he said later, "and that I was going to miss him."
Even before his brother was killed, Anton Gunn had felt the urge to public service. After graduating from U.S.C., he worked for a variety of community groups around the state whose programs were aimed at helping poor families. In 2002, Gunn heard from one of his organizer friends about a guy named Obama, a former organizer in Chicago, who was running for statewide office in Illinois. He thought little of it. "The guy's name sounded foreign to me," Gunn says. "And I had no idea he was black."
Two years later, Gunn went to his local church to hear Obama speak in support of Inez Tenenbaum, a former teacher who was running for the Senate against a right-wing Republican, Jim DeMint. Tenenbaum lost the race but Gunn never forgot Obama.
By January, 2007, with Obama now a senator and preparing to announce his candidacy for President, Gunn was sold. On a trip to Washington, D.C., he bought a copy of The Audacity of Hope at the airport; he was so engrossed in the book that he failed to hear the boarding announcement and missed his flight. He resolved to help Obama in any way he could. First, he tried a blunt approach reminiscent of his days as a pile-driving blocker for the Gamecocks. He called Obama's office in Washington and informed aides that Obama was going to lose the South Carolina primary if he lacked the services of Anton Gunn. The response, at first, was silence.
Gunn then tried calling the Chicago office of Obama's nascent campaign. He left a similar message on the answering machine: "I may not know a lot about politics, but I know South Carolina. South Carolina is an early primary state. If you want to run for President, you need to have me involved."
That day, Obama himself called Gunn, expressing interest and saying that he was going to have Steve Hildebrand, the deputy national campaign director, get in touch. A few weeks later, Gunn went to Washington to talk with Hildebrand, who was planning the strategy for the early primary states, and David Plouffe, the campaign manager. They discussed Gunn's ideas for grassroots organizing in South Carolina. Plouffe, the most important figure in the development of Obama's campaign organization, knew something about working with black candidates; he had helped Axelrod run Deval Patrick's successful 2006 gubernatorial run in Massachusetts. But Gunn had special experience to offer, especially in the subtle racial politics of South Carolina. Gunn described how, as a neophyte, he had run for the state legislature, in 2006, in the majority-white, Republican stronghold of Richland and Kershaw Counties, which had never elected an African-American. He lost by only two hundred and ninety-eight votes.
At the time, the Obama campaign was still a minimalist operation. It had just a few people starting to work in Iowa and precisely no one in South Carolina, whose primary, on January 26, 2008, followed the Iowa caucuses by just twenty-three days. The Obama team hired Gunn as its South Carolina political director--its first employee in the state. During the next few weeks, Gunn began to set up a proper office. The Obama team also hired Stacey Brayboy, an experienced campaigner and aide on Capitol Hill, as state director, and Jeremy Bird, a Midwestern labor advocate and divinity student, as field director. Brayboy and Gunn are black; Bird is white. Together they built a structure based on community-organizing principles.
The Clinton campaign set up a fairly traditional organization in South Carolina, with an emphasis on acquiring the endorsements of local civic and religious leaders and handing out "walking around money" to them to help hire canvassers and poll watchers. At first, the Obama campaign tried to match the Clinton organization at this game. It offered a five-thousand-dollar-per-month fee to Darrell Jackson, a state senator who was the pastor of a church in Columbia with more than ten thousand congregants, and his public-relations firm to help turn out the vote. Reverend Jackson, who had gained a reputation for being able to get thousands of people to the polls, earned three times that amount in 2004, when he worked for John Edwards in the state. He finally accepted a competing offer from the Clinton campaign and, according to the Wall Street Journal, earned a hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars between February, 2007, and September, 2007.
With the backing of the Chicago headquarters, Gunn, Brayboy, and Bird decided to rely more on the grass roots-organizing style of their candidate. They knew that South Carolina was different from Iowa, where the caucus-goers are motivated civic activists. South Carolina is a primary state, and African-Americans form a large core of the potential Democratic Party vote. Obama's team wanted to register and reach African-Americans who had never gone to the polls before. In order to emphasize the campaign's universalist message, they also intended to make serious gains among white voters.
The campaign team quickly discovered that many African-Americans in South Carolina not only didn't know Obama's political positions but they had no idea who he was--or even that he was black. Those same voters knew a great deal about the Clintons and, in the main, admired them. To reach black voters, the Obama team had volunteers make repeated calls on churches, barbershops, and beauty salons, handing out a poster with a picture of Obama getting his hair cut in a South Carolina barbershop. If they were lucky, they won the endorsement of the proprietor, who would thereafter wear an Obama button. At churches, they targeted not the pastor, necessarily, but the informal community leaders. "Sometimes we'd rather have 'Miss Mary,' the woman everybody talks to, supporting us than the pastor himself," Anton Gunn said. They organized gospel concerts in Charleston and Florence where the only price of admission was to provide an address or e-mail contact. "We captured six or seven thousand people that way," Gunn said.
Early in the campaign, Gunn called the campaign offices in Chicago and said that the buttons and bumper stickers they were getting were inadequate. "We told David Plouffe, 'You can't keep giving out these buttons--they don't mean anything to anyone,'" Gunn said. "'Design a button with his picture on it and say "Obama for President" so people can see this is a black man named Obama running for President.'" Gunn was a hip-hop fan, and he knew how performers marketed themselves by passing out free mix tapes and posters on the street. Gunn informed headquarters that the campaign had to give away, not sell, "chum," the term of art for T-shirts, stickers, leaflets, and buttons. The campaign responded with new campaign literature that featured pictures of Obama: some with him and his family, some with him preaching in a church. New volunteers, like novice organizers, got rigorous training and guidance, and passed out the new chum at churches, fish fries, beauty salons, barbershops, ball games, public-housing projects, medical clinics, and political rallies.
Long before the Iowa caucuses, Obama's campaign drew young volunteers who were willing to uproot and devote themselves to a long-shot candidacy. In South Carolina, one of those volunteers was a twenty-three-year-old woman from Venice, Florida, named Ashley Baia. Ashley Baia was white. She moved to Horry County, South Carolina, in June, 2007, and for the next six months campaigned in the beauty salons and barbershops of Florence and Myrtle Beach. For months, whites spurned her, sometimes saying bluntly that they would "never vote for a nigger"; blacks frequently told her that they wouldn't vote for Obama because they feared that something would happen to him or because he "didn't have a chance." Baia joined the campaign, she told her friends, because she saw in Obama someone who understood the problems of the sick and the poor. She had firsthand experience of those problems. When she was nine, her mother, Marie, was diagnosed with uterine cancer. Marie lost her job and her health insurance and she and her two daughters fell into bankruptcy. To make her mother feel better about their meager dinners, Ashley told her that she really did love relish sandwiches. Marie worked jobs--sometimes two or three jobs at a time--that did not provide health insurance and all the while, she did not know if she was going to have to leave her daughters to fend for themselves. "I didn't know if I was going to live or die," she said later. She did secretarial work, waited on tables, delivered newspapers in the middle of the night. To stretch out her prescriptions, she cut her pills in half. "All those nights I thought she didn't hear me cry, she did," Marie said.
After a year, Marie began to recover and Ashley became a political idealist. When she was a student at the University of South Florida-Sarasota/Manatee, she canvassed for John Kerry, and, two years later, she became the vice-president of the Florida College Democrats. In May, 2007, after finishing school, she went to work for Obama in South Carolina recruiting voters and volunteers. The organizers and volunteers in South Carolina and elsewhere called on the techniques of community organizing, not least to strengthen the bonds among them. Obama had interviewed church and community leaders about their "stories"; the volunteers told their own stories to each other at roundtable sessions. At one such session, in the late fall, with Valerie Jarrett present, Ashley described how her mother's suffering and the government's incapacity--or unwillingness--to do much for her had led her to politics. She wanted to "help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents, too." As Ashley spoke, Jarrett was in tears and was unable to give her own speech. Instead, she asked people to give the reasons that they had come to work for Obama.
"A lot of people talked about health care or some other issues," Ashley Baia recalled. "Then it came the turn of an older black man, a retired man, whom I'd been calling on over and over. He'd been very reluctant, though, to support Obama." The old man said that after having been visited by Baia so many times he had a simple reason for supporting Obama.
"I'm here because of Ashley," he said.
Valerie Jarrett was so touched by the encounter that she told Obama about it. He was so moved that he started thinking of that "moment of recognition," as he called it, that alliance between a poor white girl and an older black man, as emblematic of his own hopes for the campaign. For Obama, the stars were lining up in ways both big and small. He thought that he might use Ashley's story one day, perhaps in a speech.
In mid-October, 2007, with the South Carolina primary three months away, the New York Times ran a story that reflected the anxieties of many African-Americans in the state, particularly women. Clara Vereen, a sixty-one-year-old hair-stylist in the small town of Loris, said, "I've got enough black in me to want somebody black to be our President." But, she continued, "I fear that they just would kill him, that he wouldn't even have a chance." Miss Clara, as her friends called her, was considering not voting for Obama just to protect him. "We always love Hillary because we love her husband."
Black women made up twenty-nine per cent of the Democratic primary electorate in South Carolina, and they were not the only ones who felt as torn as Clara Vareen did. Obama made frequent trips to the state, and not only to black counties and neighborhoods. In June, 2007, he traveled to Greenville--the home base for Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham--and thirty-five hundred people, blacks and whites, turned out.
In early November, Obama was in South Carolina and gave speeches at two different N.A.A.C.P. dinners in a single night. He also gave a speech in the town of Manning, on the steps of the Clarendon County Courthouse, the site of a desegregation case that became part of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Clarendon is one of the poorest counties in the state. Manning sits along a strip of Interstate 95 so destitute that it is called the Corridor of Shame. Ernest Finney, the first black State Supreme Court justice in South Carolina since Reconstruction, introduced Obama, saying that he had dreamed of a black President when he was growing up in the segregated South, and now one "could be on the edge of winning."
From the staff in South Carolina, Obama had been hearing about the reluctance among some African-Americans to vote for him because of his youth and relative inexperience or because they feared for his safety. The level of threat was such that the Secret Service provided protection for Obama in May, 2007, sooner than for any other candidate except Hillary Clinton, who, as a former First Lady, had a detail with her from the start. In Manning, Obama had to respond to these anxieties, and, in the car, on the way to the speech, he kept fiddling with the text. When he arrived, he spoke directly to black voters:
I've heard some folks say, "Yeah, he talks good. We like his wife. He's got some pretty children. But you know we're just not sure that America is ready for an African-American President." Y'all heard that before. You've heard the same voices you heard fifty years ago. "Maybe it's not time yet, maybe we need to wait. America is not ready." So I just want y'all to be clear: I would not be running if I were not confident I was going to win.
I'm not interested in second place. I'm not running to be Vice-President. I'm not running to be secretary of something or other. I'm a United States senator already. Everybody already knows me. I already sold a lot of books. I don't need to run for President to get on television or on the radio. I've been on "Oprah." I'm running to be President of the United States of America....
So the brothers and sisters out there telling folks I can't win, don't defeat ourselves. Get that out of your mind that you can't do something. I don't believe in you can't do something. Yes, we can do something. What kind of message are we sending to our children, you can't do something?
This was the richest accent and the most direct form of rhetoric that Obama could summon. The speech was widely covered, but it still did not quite do the job; it did not completely erase the fears. "People were still talking about how the last time someone was as good as Barack was Bobby Kennedy or his brother John, and we saw what happened to them," Anton Gunn said. "There was general fear."
As the attacks on Obama began to accumulate on the Internet and cable television--attacks that tried to portray him as foreign, as a Muslim, as a covert radical in a business suit--the candidate summoned a vernacular that would not have worked in the cornfields and diners of Iowa. Speaking to a largely African-American crowd in Sumter, Obama rebuffed an e-mail barrage claiming that he was Muslim. "Don't let people turn you around because they're just making stuff up. That's what they do. They try to bamboozle you, hoodwink you." Similar lines are spoken by Malcolm X, in Spike Lee's biopic. Played by Denzel Washington, Malcolm warns a gathering of blacks about being "bamboozled" by "the white man." ("I say, and I say it again, you been had. You been took. You been hoodwinked. Bamboozled. Led astray. Run amuck. This is what he does.") Obama's spokesman, Robert Gibbs, solemnly informed the press that he didn't really know if the candidate knew the language was inspired by Lee's film about Malcolm X, but it was impossible to believe that he didn't.
Obama had still not wiped away all resistance to his candidacy. Anton Gunn admitted with some trepidation that in South Carolina it would help Obama if African-American voters saw that he had not married a white or a light-skinned black woman. "Like it or not, that stuff matters to people here," he said. ("I don't think Obama could have been elected President if he had married a white woman," Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a political scientist at Princeton who regularly attended Obama's church when she lived in Chicago, said. "Had he married a white woman, he would have signaled that he had chosen whiteness, a consistent visual reminder that he was not on the African-American side. Michelle anchored him. Part of what we as African-Americans like about Barack is the visual image of him in the White House, and it would have been stunningly different without Michelle and those brown-skinned girls.")
The campaign decided to send Michelle Obama to South Carolina to speak a few days before Thanksgiving. The site they chose was Orangeburg, a town of thirteen thousand that, from the start of the civil-rights movement, had been the scene of school desegregation battles, hunger strikes, protest marches, commercial boycotts, and, in February, 1968, a violent confrontation between police and demonstrators from South Carolina State University, a nearby black college who were protesting at a segregated bowling alley. The police fired into the crowd, killing three protesters and injuring twenty-eight; the incident is known as "the Orangeburg Massacre." The campaign scheduled the speech on the campus of South Carolina State.
Michelle Obama began by describing a meeting with Coretta Scott King, who died in 2006. "What I remember most was that she told me not to be afraid because God was with us, Barack and me, and that she would always keep us in her prayers," she said. She recounted all that Coretta Scott King had suffered, and reeled off the names of her heroic predecessors: Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Dorothy Height, Shirley Chisholm, C. Delores Tucker, Mary McLeod Bethune. "These were all women who cast aside the voices of doubt and fear that said, 'Wait,' 'You can't do that,' 'It's not your turn,' 'The timing isn't right,' 'The country just isn't ready.'"
Michelle Obama made countless appearances on the campaign trail, but the Orangeburg speech was her Joshua-generation speech--a pivotal direct address to the African-American community. The campaign, in general, had been so careful not to overdo the theme of race for fear of putting off white voters; this speech was one of the exceptional moments. Michelle Obama was sure to pay tribute to the generation of the past--"I am standing on their shoulders today"--before asking for the confidence and the support of the voters. She made plain her family history. She was like them. She was descended from slaves who lived in the state. Her grandfather was from Georgetown, South Carolina. She had the love of her parents, teachers, and pastors, but she also recalled the voices of classmates "who thought a black girl with a book was acting white." She had learned to put aside "that gnawing sense of self-doubt that is common within all of us." She described her path from the South Side of Chicago to Harvard Law School, but quickly showed that she was aware that "too many little black girls" don't have the chances that she did. These were girls who were routinely held back by poverty, unsafe and inadequate schools, crime, and racism. Her husband, she said, "is running to be the President who finally lifts up the poor and forgotten in all corners of this country." He should be President "not because of the color of his skin, it is because of the quality and consistency of his character"--an echo of King's "content of their character." Finally, she addressed the fears that so many black South Carolinians had expressed to Obama's earnest young volunteers--the fear that he was not ready, the fears for his life:
Now, I know folks talk in the barbershops and beauty salons, and I've heard some folks say, "That Barack, he seems like a nice guy, but I'm not sure America's ready for a black President." Well, all I can say is we've heard those voices before. Voices that say, "Maybe we should wait," and "No, you can't do it." "You're not ready"--"You're not experienced." Voices that focus on what might go wrong, rather than what's possible. And I understand it. I know where it comes from, this sense of doubt and fear about what the future holds. That veil of impossibility that keeps us down and keeps our children down, that keeps us waiting and hoping for a turn that may never come....
And I want to talk not just about fear but about love. Because I know it's also about love. I know people care about Barack and our family. I know people want to protect us and themselves from disappointment, failure. I know people are proud of us. I know that people understand that Barack is special. You don't see this kind of man often.
I equate it to that aunt or that grandmother that bought all that new furniture--spent her life savings on it and then what does she do? She puts plastic on it to protect it. That plastic gets yellow and scratches up your leg and it's hot and sticky. But see grandma is just trying to protect that furniture--the problem is that she doesn't get the full enjoyment, the benefit, from the furniture because she's trying to protect it. I think folks just want to protect us from the possibility of being let down--not by us but by the world as it is. The world, they fear, is not ready for a decent man like Barack. Sometimes it seems better not to try at all than to try and fail.
We have to remember that these complicated emotions are what folks who marched in the civil-rights movement had to overcome all those decades ago. It's what so many of us have struggled to overcome in our own lives. And it's what we're going to have to overcome as a community if we want to lift ourselves up. We're going to have to dig deep into our souls, confront our own self-doubt, and recognize that our destiny is in our hands, that our future is what we make of it. So let's build the future we all know is possible. Let's prove to our children that they really can reach for their dreams. Let's show them that America is ready for Barack Obama. Right now....
I want you to dream of that day--the day Barack Obama is sworn in as President. Imagine our family on that inaugural platform. America will look at itself differently. The world will look at America differently.
The message, conveyed in language far more emotionally raw than her husband ever allowed himself, was unmistakable. Just as Coretta King had no fear and, finally, no regrets, Michelle Obama had no fears--or at least no fears that held her back from supporting her husband. Her message was homey and direct. He will be O.K. He wants what you want. Now is the time. And he can win. Michelle Obama appeared before larger audiences--her speech at the Democratic Convention in Denver reached many millions of people, not a few thousand--but she never gave a more direct racial appeal. In Orangeburg, she asked black men and women to focus on the intersection of emotion and historical imagination; that was the sweet spot of her speech and the campaign was banking on it to work.
In the days before the primary, the voters of South Carolina did not provide much clarity in the polls. The black leadership in the state was still divided. One state senator, Robert Ford, a civil-rights veteran who had worked for King during the Poor People's Campaign, told a reporter that Obama's chances of getting the nomination were "slim," and that if he were to head the Democratic ticket "we'd lose the House and the Senate and the governors and everything.... I'm a gambling man. I love Obama, but I'm not going to kill myself." Ford stayed with Hillary. The situation among white voters seemed even more in doubt.
On January 20, 2008, a week before the South Carolina primary, Obama went to Atlanta to speak in honor of Martin Luther King's birthday at Ebenezer Baptist. The speech was reminiscent of the speech in Selma and several thereafter--until the end, when he told the story of Ashley Baia and the elderly black man in Horry County who said that he had been won over by her:
By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough to change a country. By itself, it is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children. But it is where we begin. It is why I believe that the walls in that room began to crack and shake at that moment.
And if they can shake in that room, then they can shake in Atlanta. And if they can shake in Atlanta, they can shake in the state of Georgia. And if they can shake in Georgia, they can shake all across America. And if enough of our voices join together, if we see each other in each other's eyes, we can bring those walls tumbling down. The walls of Jericho can finally come tumbling down.
Once more, the story and the cadences of the civil-rights movement were extended to meet the story of the Obama campaign--and all in a resonant place. With time, Obama's confidence regarding the black vote and the question of authenticity increased. When, in a South Carolina debate, a reporter asked him, "Do you think Bill Clinton was our first black President?" Obama smiled and risked playing the role of a wry arbiter of blackness. Suddenly, he was no longer the cautious candidate but a man unafraid to parade his ethnic pride. "I would have to investigate more of Bill's dancing abilities," Obama said, "before I accurately judge whether he was, in fact, a brother."
In the same debate, a brutal encounter that took place on Martin Luther King Day at the Palace Theater, in Myrtle Beach, Hillary Clinton tried to emphasize her own presence in the Presidential race as a triumph of the civil-rights movement. "I'm reminded of one of my heroes, Frederick Douglass," she said, "who had on the masthead of his newspaper in upstate New York, The North Star, that right has no sex and truth no color. And that is really the profound message of Dr. King."
The Myrtle Beach debate was the nastiest of the entire campaign, with the candidates exchanging barbs over Obama's relationship with the "slum landlord" Tony Rezko and Clinton's advocacy as a corporate lawyer for Walmart. It was such a charged evening that as Clinton walked off the stage, she told her team, "I'm sorry, but he was such an a*shole." Obama told Jarrett, "I probably went a little too far but she did, too."
After months of underestimating Obama's campaign, the Clintons now recognized the threat. "We were running against a very talented man," one of their top aides said. "In South Carolina, we didn't understand what to do. After we lost Iowa, the African-American vote was draining out of us so fast, like there was a hole at the bottom of the swimming pool, and you could just watch the tracking polls and see it evaporate. In New Hampshire we had won, even though we'd been down as much as sixteen points. It was unbelievable. We were so unprepared to win that we had to throw Howard"--Howard Wolfson, Clinton's communications director--"on TV, unshaven. The press decided that because we won by three [points] and the polls had shown her down eight, there was something back in play called the Bradley effect. Reporters were convinced that had to be the explanation. It undermined, it delegitimized, our win, and now it was out there, a new element being discussed coming into South Carolina, where so much of the Democratic vote is black."
On January 26th, Obama far exceeded expectations in South Carolina, winning overwhelmingly. In a three-way race with Clinton and John Edwards, he took fifty-five per cent overall to Clinton's twenty-seven. Obama lost only two of the state's forty-six counties. Edwards, who came from neighboring North Carolina, drew a weak eighteen per cent of the vote and, four days later, withdrew from the race. Obama won eighty per cent of the African-American vote, and he continued to win at least that for the rest of the campaign. In a three-way race, Obama also won a quarter of the white vote; he even came in first with white voters under the age of forty. It was the calculus of the 2004 Illinois Democratic primary campaign taking shape on the Presidential level--a near sweep of the black vote combined with a healthy percentage of white progressives and some centrists.
"South Carolina was incredibly emotional," Cassandra Butts, Obama's longtime friend and aide, recalled. "Sitting in the boiler room and watching the returns, we realized that we had done exactly what we needed to do. Afterward there was the victory rally and people were chanting 'Race Doesn't Matter! Race Doesn't Matter!' Intellectually, I know that isn't the case, but these people were so moved by this candidate that they were willing to suspend disbelief."
African-American leaders now started to reconsider their loyalties as their constituents abandoned the Clintons. "I had an executive session with myself," John Lewis said. His constituents in Atlanta were behind Obama, and Lewis, for the first time in many years, was facing possible opposition in what had long been a safe district. He sensed that Obama was leading a campaign that was an electoral echo of the movement that had shaped his own life. Politically and emotionally, he was left with no option. He phoned Bill and Hillary Clinton to tell them that he loved them but that he was going with Barack Obama. "I realized that I was on the wrong side of history," Lewis said.
Until South Carolina, the Clintons thought that their history and relationships would assure them of a large percentage--even half--of the African-American vote. "Our whites on the staff, like Harold Ickes, had tons of experience with race," one Clinton adviser said. "Ickes had lost a kidney when he was beaten by whites at a civil-rights demonstration in Louisiana and had worked for Jesse Jackson. So when the time came that we lost John Lewis, Ickes said that it was like a kick in the nuts. He said, 'I can't believe this is happening.' But the Clintons understood that John Lewis had to move."
The South Carolina primary also revealed something about the Obama campaign. Although it was run mainly by a very tight circle of aides--David Plouffe, David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, and other white men--there was a diversity of opinion at work that gave the campaign greater versatility. Valerie Jarrett, Cornell Belcher, Cassandra Butts, and, on a local level, people like Anton Gunn and Stacey Brayboy were able to shape tactics.
"I don't think there was ever a Presidential campaign before with a lot of people who looked like me," the pollster Cornell Belcher, said. "I wasn't sitting at just the smaller table dealing with the black shit. There was a lot of back-and-forth conversation about these subtle racial issues--a lot of conference calls, for instance, about Orangeburg. We had to really deal with the fact that there were African-Americans, older ones, who remember people dying. We had to win their confidence."
The conventional wisdom was that Iowa was the key: once blacks in South Carolina saw that whites would vote for Obama, they believed he had a real chance to win. Anton Gunn and Cornell Belcher, however, were among those who thought that there were limits to that analysis. "To say that Iowa broke it open and made black people support him is close to being racist," Belcher said. "Obama's numbers popped everywhere after Iowa. It wasn't just that his black numbers popped, it was everywhere."
Obama's increasing success as a national candidate, Belcher went on, was based on the fact that Obama was judged as an individual. "Because of who he is, he was inoculated from the stereotypes, the idea that somehow African-Americans don't share your values or are more morally loose or less intelligent," he said. "There were things about Barack, whether it was his family or his educational credentials, that made him able to individuate himself. What were the X factors? Does a biracial family heritage figure in? His Ivy League education? The image of a strong family man speaking out about personal responsibility?
"South Carolina was revealing," Belcher continued. "So much unfolded there about where we are, racially and culturally. Obama didn't start off winning black people in America or in South Carolina. That took effort. What went down was that he became an authentic, credible voice in the African-American community to such an extent that he wasn't just winning black voters; he was blowing Hillary away. She didn't break fifteen per cent of the African-American vote. He completely dominated a core Democratic constituency. No one could compete with him in North Carolina, Louisiana, Virginia, Mississippi, or Alabama. Think about if Hillary could have won twenty, twenty-five per cent of the black vote in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia--it's a different race."
The nomination battle between Obama and Clinton lasted for four and a half more months. After the breakthrough victory in South Carolina, Obama won a dramatic endorsement from Edward and Caroline Kennedy, but he emerged from Super Tuesday, on February 5th, with a projected lead of just fourteen delegates--a virtual dead heat. What Obama had done, however, was to prove that Clinton was not inevitable and that her campaign was weak, unfocused, and disorganized. It was absolutely impossible to overstate the friction inside the Clinton campaign, its resentment of the press, the sense of wounded pride. For the rest of the race, Obama never relinquished his lead, and, despite the fury in her ranks, Clinton was tenacious and, arguably, she defeated Obama in the majority of their debates. At one campaign event, Obama told an old Chicago friend, "Do I have to drive a stake through her heart? She just will not die!"
No small part of the drama of this seeming hundred years war was the racial dynamic, those not infrequent moments when a candidate or a surrogate said something that could be interpreted as a racial appeal. One early sign that the 2008 race would feature this subtext came when Joseph Biden, an early candidate for the nomination, said, in January, 2007, that Obama was the "first mainstream African-American [candidate], who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." Anyone who knew Biden assumed that he was being his usual self: syntactically undisciplined and oblivious of the resonance of terms like "articulate" and "clean." But, unlike older black leaders, including Jackson and Sharpton, who condemned Biden for the remark, Obama was initially unfazed. He brushed it off, saying that Biden "didn't intend to offend" anyone; "I have no problem with Joe Biden." Obama wanted to appear to be the opposite of hypersensitive--I'm not the guy who sees racism everywhere--but, when the criticism of Biden continued, he issued a statement that Biden's comments "obviously were historically inaccurate."
The mood among Obama's aides was less forgiving when one of Clinton's campaign co-chairmen in New Hampshire, Bill Shaheen, told the Washington Post that Obama would come under extra scrutiny from the Republicans for his use of drugs as a youth: "It'll be 'When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?'" Shaheen's comment echoed one of David Axelrod's memos to Obama, but in this context it seemed like a poisonous insinuation. At first Hillary Clinton was delighted with the statement and urged her aides to amplify it, but then when her campaign realized that it was playing terribly in the press, Shaheen apologized and resigned. Clinton herself met with Obama on the tarmac at Reagan Airport, in Washington, D.C., to apologize--a meeting that quickly turned sour when the two started exchanging recriminations.
In the course of the campaign, the slights (real or imagined, depending on the listener) began to mount. There was Robert Johnson, the African-American media mogul and Hillary supporter, saying that while the Clintons were working hard for blacks and the public good, "Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood--and I won't say what he was doing, but he said it in his book." The reference, of course, was to Obama's self-described drug use as a young man.
There was Hillary Clinton saying, in January, "Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a President to get it done." To a Hillary supporter, she was merely stating the historical fact: King rallied public opposition to racism, but to change policy in Washington required Johnson and the power of the Presidency. To some Obama supporters, however, Clinton was slighting the heroism, the struggle, and the suffering of the movement. "The perception was that she was discounting the prophetic voice, diminishing the role that Martin Luther King played--and by extension diminishing Barack and his ability," Cassandra Butts said. "This goes to the critique of Barack as a lightweight, that he wasn't the hard worker that Senator Clinton was. It wasn't in isolation." In a conference call with reporters, Obama said that Clinton "made an unfortunate remark, an ill-advised remark."
The day before the New Hampshire primary, with polls promising a victory for Obama, Bill Clinton had told an audience, "This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen." To those who heard or read the line in isolation, Clinton seemed to be referring to Obama himself as a "fairy tale," an enchantment boosted by a smitten press. What he was saying, however, was something quite different--it was that Obama's opposition to the war was a "fairy tale." The Clintons kept hammering home the message that after Obama became a senator, his votes and his rhetoric on Iraq were much the same as Hillary Clinton's. This, too, was arguably true--and echoed one of Mark Penn's themes--but it was not racial. Clinton also referred to Obama as a "kid," a throwaway moment of condescension that some Obama supporters, like the prominent Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, cited as another term "for being uppity, it's a way of saying 'Who is he?'" Donna Brazile, who had been a campaign aide to President Clinton in 1992 and 1996, said, "I will tell you, as an African-American, I find his tone and his words to be very depressing."
When it seemed that Obama was going to win in South Carolina, Bill Clinton, who had campaigned hard in the state, remarked to reporters, "Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, in '84 and '88. And he ran a good campaign and Senator Obama has run a good campaign here. He's run a good campaign everywhere." To many in the Obama campaign, it seemed that Clinton was trying to yoke Jackson and Obama together as black candidates running implausible, can't-win campaigns.
"I don't think there was a racial strategy behind it, but I think it was delivered trying to diminish the win," David Plouffe said. Jackson himself saw nothing racist in Clinton's remarks, and, later that year, Clinton, while he was traveling in Africa, made clear his resentment of commentators who said that such remarks had hurt his wife's campaign.
"Do you personally have any regrets about what you did campaigning for your wife?" the ABC correspondent Kate Snow asked Clinton.
"Yes, but not the ones you think," he said. "And it would be counterproductive for me to talk about it. There are things that I wish I had urged her to do, things I wish I had said, things I wish I hadn't said. But I am not a racist, I never made a racist comment. And I didn't attack [Obama] personally.
"The South Carolina thing," Clinton continued, "was twisted for deliberate effect by people who weren't for Hillary. It was O.K. with me, but, you know, these people don't have an office in Harlem. They haven't lived the life I have lived."
Mark Penn, the most senior of Hillary's aides, says, "The Clintons had been like heroes in the African-American community. They had never done anything in their lives that would have allowed their comments to be misconstrued. And the treatment of the Clintons by the press was fundamentally unfair."
And yet, another close aide to the Clinton campaign said, "Bill Clinton sometimes forgets he's a former President and he behaves like a history teacher, and he'll say something that is historically true but rings the wrong way coming from him. We were not sensitive enough. Remember, we were exhausted. All we were hearing from the press was how much we sucked, how Obama was heading a change movement, how our crowds were smaller than his--and this pisses you off, it beats you down. In eight days, you go from having no conversation about race at all to having it be a huge subject. You don't quite feel it happening because of everything else going on. It's the fog of war. You are like a frog in boiling water. You don't quite sense the life being drained out of you until it's too late."
Some of Clinton's friends watched what was happening with a mixture of dismay and sympathy. "All through the Bush years, black America and liberal America really loved Bill Clinton," one longtime friend said. "Bill could go out and, without a speech in his hand, be brilliant on so many topics. But I think after Obama showed up it was really hard on him not to be the cool guy anymore, not to be the smart guy, or the liberal guy or the black guy."
Bill Clinton's frustration was so deep, and his lack of discipline so striking, that he told a Philadelphia radio station, "I think they played the race card on me." And later, when he was asked about the remark, he denied having said it.
The Obama people knew that their best political move was to step back and watch. Meanwhile, on black radio stations, one could hear African-American voters saying that they were dismayed with the Clintons, that they were now crossing over to Obama. "Until Bill Clinton's comments in South Carolina, there were still a lot of black people who weren't convinced Barack could succeed and we were still hearing that old 'Is he black enough?' stuff," said Mona Sutphen, a former aide in the Clinton administration, who became a foreign policy adviser for Obama and ended up as deputy chief of staff in the Obama White House. "When Clinton linked him to Jesse, ironically, he made him black enough.... The dustup turned black folks off. You can't out-black a black man, was the common refrain. If you try to go down that road, it's going to be a disaster."
In the wake of Super Tuesday, Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton and a Clinton supporter, wrote an angry article in The New Republic saying that reporters' adoration of Obama, together with their notion of the Clintons as sleazy and power-hungry, had allowed them to take innocuous remarks and turn them into racial appeals. "To a large degree," Wilentz wrote, "the campaign's strategists turned the primary and caucus race to their advantage when they deliberately, falsely, and successfully portrayed Clinton and her campaign as unscrupulous race-baiters." Wilentz called such tactics "the most outrageous deployment of racial politics since the Willie Horton ad campaign in 1988 and the most insidious since Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, praising states' rights." Wilentz even compared Bill Clinton's situation to that of Coleman Silk, the tragic hero of Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain. Silk, a light-skinned black man who is a professor of classics and who has passed for white all his life, is ruined when, preposterously, he is accused of making racist remarks in his classroom during a period of hyper-vigilant political correctness on campus. Wilentz was not part of the campaign, but he certainly reflected the feelings of the Clintons, who thought that Obama and his advisers were expertly exploiting the charges of race for their political benefit. At the same time, however, Hillary wished her husband would tone down his attacks; they were not helping her. The problem was, she could not bear to confront him herself.
Not long after Wilentz's article appeared, Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate in 1984, told the Daily Breeze, a newspaper in Torrance, California, "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept." A week later, after Ferraro had been heavily criticized and the Clinton campaign failed to embrace her remarks, she told the New York Times, "I am livid at this thing. Any time you say anything to anybody about the Obama campaign, it immediately becomes a racist attack."
Privately, Hillary Clinton was deeply frustrated by these eruptions. They were distractions and did her no good. "Her reaction to the President's Jesse Jackson comment in South Carolina was 'Oh no!'" one aide recalled. "She loves him, but she knows what kind of game this is. She remembers that when she said that thing, in 1992, about staying home and baking chocolate-chip cookies, you get burned. That's the environment. And these blips, these moments--people believed that we were engineering them, that we were trying to paint Obama as the 'black candidate.'"
Hillary Clinton had not adopted Mark Penn's advice to isolate Obama as a "foreign" candidate. The comment of hers that smacked most of rank desperation, however, came in May, 2008, before the Kentucky and West Virginia ballots. "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she told USA Today. She cited an article and polling information in the Associated Press "that found how Senator Obama's support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how the, you know, whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. There's a pattern emerging here." Again, the statement was literally true--white working-class Democratic voters mainly favored her--but the phrasing was so maladroit (to be charitable) and the racial sensitivities so heightened, that Clinton came in for another round of criticism. This time, she was the culprit, not her husband. Charles Rangel, the New York congressman, who was one of her leading black supporters, told the New York Daily News, "I can't believe Senator Clinton would say anything that dumb."
Mona Sutphen, who became deputy chief of staff for Obama, was among those in Obama's camp who were beginning to see that race was helping far more than it was hurting his candidacy. "The diversity of Barack's background, not that he was African-American per se, was essential," she said. "He was doing well in the places where the electorate was younger, and, the younger the electorate is, the browner it is, the more diverse. He sums up, he is, the embodiment of American diversity. In the end, that played really well for him."
* * *
With time, political campaigns tend to be viewed through the triumphalist prism of the winner. Obama's campaign is of such historical importance that it is easy to forget just how close the race actually was. Obama was far from an inevitability. We tend to forget that, if Hillary Clinton had won the Presidency, she, too, would have broken a historical barrier. What's more, Clinton was arguably on the receiving end of more condescension ("You're likable enough, Hillary") and bigoted remarks in the media and on the Internet; along the way, she was compared to everything from a "hellish housewife" to a castrating Lorena Bobbitt.
One afternoon, months after the election was over and the emotions of the campaign had cooled, a veteran Clinton aide told me about the way he and his colleagues--and the Clintons themselves--had experienced their run against Barack Obama:
We knew we were walking in a racial minefield--the "racial funhouse," the President called it. It would now be an issue that, no matter what our history, we were white and they were black. By the way, Obama didn't seem to want this, either. But the racial arbiters, it seemed to us, were mainly Northeastern liberals, who had very little contact with African-Americans in their lives--the press.
The conversations we were having in the campaign were chaotic, confused. Everything was turned on its head, everything was distorted and flipped and skewed. Some people inside thought we should address it. More thought that no, this was never supposed to be part of the campaign. We lived and died by the presumption that we were geniuses, that everything we did and everything that happened was by design and was brilliant. Remember, for sixteen years the Clintons were the big dogs of the Democratic Party. We knew how to win. Who else did? But the Obama campaign was running a Clinton operation--but better than us, cooler, more disciplined. Believe me, the Obama people pushed every bit as much opposition research stuff at the press as we did, but their reputation in the press was that they were ... nice. We had the reputation of "the War Room," the tough guys. And, if you are a jewel thief and walk into a jewelry store, all eyes are going to be on you. If you are perceived to be making a false move, you get arrested.
We still believed that we'd get the benefit of the doubt, that these two people, with their history in civil rights, with a largely African-American management team, were not running a race-baiting campaign. The conventional wisdom, though, was that we were. In the same way that Barack didn't want to be the black candidate, Hillary didn't want to be the female candidate. She made an emotional speech at Wellesley but we got kicked for it, for playing the woman card!
Both campaigns discovered an old political reality: that exquisite interpretation is a constant in Presidential campaigns--especially when race and gender are such enormous factors. Politics becomes a spectacle of exhausted candidates and their exhausted aides trying to calibrate their words and, no matter what their talents, they cannot hope to be received in some ideal way that assumes their good intentions. The crosscurrents of competition, calculation, malice, frenetic communication, and indiscipline practically guarantee an atmosphere of ongoing crisis, mistrust, and mutual rage. Never mind that the amount of truly intentional malevolence on either side during the 2008 Democratic primary race was, in the light of many earlier campaigns, minimal. This spectacle is a large part of what is called, in the cliche of the time, the "narrative" of politics. Indeed, both Obama and Clinton usually went out of their way not to accent their sense of injury as a means to win sympathy and votes.
"We did a video," a Clinton aide recalled, "called 'The Politics of Pile-On,' which made her seem like the victim, and she was so mad about that. She said, 'I've spent a long time convincing moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats that I am capable of being a commander-in-chief, I've kicked the shit out of the boys on defense and security issues in these debates, and now you want me to be the victim?' Vogue wanted to do a story by Julia Reed with pictures by Annie Leibovitz. Even though Vogue had done a spectacular rehab job, a cover, after Monica, and probably the most flattering pictures ever taken of Hillary, she said, 'After spending years getting people to take me seriously as a commander-in-chief, a glamorous photo shoot in Vogue doesn't strike me right.'"
In the end, Clinton's aides realized that their campaign was less agile and cohesive, less romantic than Obama's. Their theme of reliability was the wrong one for the time. "Early on, there was an idea to make her a change candidate, too, and it was even suggested that we'd get a million women to give twenty-five dollars apiece. But by the time we thought to do it, it was decided that it would look desperate," one of her aides said. "We never pivoted successfully from 'strength and experience' to a sense of the person. People always just assumed Hillary was power-hungry, an in-fighter, robotic, and we never got across the sense of her as a devoted public servant. She was badly served by us. We never made her a three-dimensional person, a person with a rich history. We began with the most famous woman in the world and we didn't do enough with it."
Clinton's aides, like Clinton herself, came to respect the way Obama had played the game they thought that they had mastered above all others--Democratic Party politics. But, despite that respect, the Clintons and their advisers felt an overpowering sense of grievance and resentment, as if the rules of the contest had been written in Obama's favor.
"Throughout the whole campaign, it felt like we were playing as the visiting team at Soldier Field in Chicago," one aide said. "Every time they did something, the place went wild. Every time we won something, there was silence. Obama was new and he was hopeful and he projected change. And he had a better narrative. Of course, we thought the narrative was full of shit. We didn't understand why his politically calculating chameleon nature was never discussed. We were said to be the chameleons, but he changed his life depending on who he was talking to. He melded himself according to what the situation was."