Chapter Fifteen
The Book of Jeremiah
On March 13, 2008, nine days after Obama lost the Ohio and Texas primaries to Clinton, ABC's "World News Tonight" broadcast video clips of Jeremiah Wright preaching at Trinity United Church of Christ. This was more than a year after Wright had been quoted in Rolling Stone and he was asked not to give the invocation at Obama's announcement speech, in Springfield. Shockingly, neither the Obama campaign nor the Clinton campaign had bothered to do the obvious--dig deeply into recordings of Reverend Wright's sermons, many of which were on sale in the church gift shop. It was a ludicrous oversight. "It's not like we ignored it completely, but what we didn't do is to have people like me say, 'I want to watch all of the tapes,'" David Plouffe recalled. "I didn't do that. Ax didn't do that.... We live in a visual world. The moments in the campaign that really exploded were those that were on video. We failed the candidate in that regard." If a network had found the sermons on the eve of the Iowa caucuses or another early pivotal moment, Obama might have been knocked out of the race in a single stroke.
Brian Ross, the ABC journalist who put together the report, had been asked by the producers of "Good Morning America" to look into Jeremiah Wright. The job was not especially urgent, Ross felt, but, in mid-February, after a request for an interview was turned down by Wright, he and a couple of assistants went online and, for about five hundred dollars, ordered twenty-nine hours of Wright's sermons on DVD.
"The Clinton people pushed opposition research but not about Wright," Ross recalled. "We started watching these sermons. They were entertaining enough, but they were endless. It was a low-priority project. But then we started seeing things that were of interest." One day, while he was doing a couple of other things, Ross glanced up at the video of Wright giving a fiery sermon about 9/11. "I thought, Oh, gee. This is something," Ross said. "It had been background noise. What I had really been looking for was a panning shot of Obama in the congregation. Given the efficiency of the Obama operation and how the Tribune and Lynn Sweet at the Sun-Times worked, I figured someone had already gone down this road."
Once he had assembled the clips of Wright, Ross called one of Obama's spokesmen, Bill Burton. The campaign told Ross about Wright's career in the military, about his importance on the South Side and as a national figure in the black church, but said little about the sermons. Ross and his producer started to prepare a report, including the excerpts from Wright's sermons and some footage of congregants at Trinity praising him.
The clip on the ABC broadcast that had first caught Ross's attention came from a sermon called "The Day of Jerusalem's Fall," delivered on September 16, 2001--the first Sunday after the Al Qaeda attacks on Manhattan and Washington. "We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed Nagasaki. And we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon--and we never batted an eye!" Wright shouted angrily. "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America's chickens! Are coming home! To roost!" The last formulation would have been known to anyone in that church; it was a direct quotation of what Malcolm X said a week after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the remark that led Elijah Muhammad to suspend Malcolm from the Nation of Islam. Malcolm X also charged the U.S. government with complicity in the murders of Medgar Evers, Patrice Lumumba, and four black girls in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.
Viewers also saw Wright condemning "the U.S. of K.K.K. A.," castigating Condoleezza Rice for her "Cond-amnesia," and saying, "No, no, no! Not God bless America. God damn America" in a sermon delivered on April 13, 2003, called "Confusing God and Government."
"When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed," Wright said. "She put them in chains. The government put them in slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest-paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives [young black men] drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no! Not God Bless America. God damn America--that's in the Bible--for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizens as less than human." In this case, Wright claimed to me, he was quoting not only Biblical injunctions against murder but also William James, who wrote in a letter, "God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles."
The ABC report also showed Wright endorsing an ugly conspiracy theory: "The government lied about inventing the H.I.V. virus as a means of genocide against people of color."
Within hours, the clips of Wright's sermons were all over the airwaves and the Internet. The day after, the Obama campaign removed Wright from the largely ceremonial African-American Religious Leadership Committee.
Fox played the clips in a constant cycle and the tabloid New York Post called Wright "Obama's Minister of Hate." But it was not just the right-wing media and Web sites that were attacking Wright. Some liberal and left-wing black journalists were also deeply critical, finding the 9/11 speech heartless and the conspiracy mongering outrageous. Bob Herbert, in the New York Times, called him a "loony preacher"; Patricia Williams, in The Nation, called him a "crazy ex-minister."
Clinton's operatives had done a cursory review of Wright as early as September, 2007, but the campaign, led by Hillary Clinton herself, decided that pursuing the story too aggressively and attempting to push it to the media was a foolhardy tactic. At first, in their overconfidence, they felt they didn't need to take Obama seriously enough to warrant a risky opposition-research strategy. Then, as Obama's campaign became a greater threat, the Clinton people thought that pushing the story could backfire. If it ever got out that they were behind a leak, they believed, the campaign could be branded as racist. In retrospect, some aides regretted their lack of focus on Wright.
"There was a school of thought in our campaign that felt it was hard to believe that Senator Obama, who was long associated with that church and pastor, didn't know about Wright's statements," one senior campaign adviser said. "It strained credulity. By contrast, the Obama campaign was very adroit at turning such attacks against him around and saying that they were racially motivated." Ruefully, Hillary Clinton wondered aloud what the public reaction would have been if her pastor in Little Rock had made similar statements. The sense of persecution, the sense of a slanted press and a tilted playing field, deepened in her camp. Some aides held out hope that rumors of a tape showing Michelle Obama castigating "whitey" would save the campaign. The tape did not exist. The atmosphere of dark frenzy and frustration was so deep that the Clinton team fastened onto any notion that the Obamas were anti-white or were subtly dealing the race card.
"If Jeremiah Wright had dropped in January, it would have been over," another Clinton aide said. "We sent someone up to Chicago to check it out but we found too little to make anything of it. The ABC stuff was not from us. With Wright, we sensed blood in the water--those of us whose job it is to sense blood in the water--but Hillary refused to let us go after it more. She didn't want it to go away, mind you, and she was really troubled by what Wright said and the whole relationship between him and Obama, but she knew that if we touched it too explicitly it would turn to poison."
In fact, the report did have a toxic effect on the Obama campaign and threatened to kill it. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, a professor of African-American studies at Vanderbilt, wrote astutely about the threat of Wright's rhetoric for the Obama campaign. "Wright's homiletics had the effect of coloring Obama in a bit too darkly; his damning of American racism and genocides at home and abroad diminished Obama's averred gift of 'second sight' into both black and white worlds, marred his claim to authenticity and a new politics," she wrote. "Jeremiah's jeremiads imperiled the currency of the 'O' brand of politics, one that shunned partisan political attacks as well as dicing up the electorate into so many factions." This might have been putting it too fancily. More bluntly, the sermons associated Obama with an angry radicalism that could potentially alienate countless voters--and not only white voters.
There was, Wright's friends and supporters contended, a context for "God damn America" and for his most radical rhetoric. Wright saw himself as--and Obama understood him to be--an inheritor of a tradition of protest from the pulpit, not an accommodationist, and hardly a politician. His Sunday-morning sermons were meant to rouse, to accuse, and to help people shake free of their apathy and dejection. Wright's faults were obvious--his outsized ego and his pride, his tendency to mistake conspiracy theory for reality, his unwillingness ever to find fault in leaders like Louis Farrakhan or Muammar Qaddafi--but at his best he was part of a tradition well known to millions of churchgoing African-Americans. Certainly, his devotion to his community was immense. He poured enormous energy and resources into education and into helping single mothers, addicts, alcoholics, and the homeless. But that would never be explained adequately on cable television. The Obama campaign knew that voters would see those videotapes and be encouraged to wonder about the candidate's associations and allegiances. Underneath Obama's cool yet embracing demeanor, was he a cartoon version of Wright, full of condemnation and resentment? Damage control, in the form of sound bites and surrogate interviews, would not work.
As Obama's political career grew more intense and his children got a little older, he and Michelle did not spend quite as much time at Trinity as they had when they were first together. Sometimes, on Sundays, Obama might go to Trinity, but he also went to other churches, for political reasons, or skipped church entirely. Nevertheless, he had certainly sat through enough radical sermons by Wright--and without protest--so that it would be folly to start trying to make fine distinctions. He knew that that sort of hairsplitting would mean nothing, not after he had repeatedly, in his book and in public remarks, praised Wright as a minister and a personal adviser. As recently as January, 2007, he had been quoted in the Chicago Tribune saying, "What I value most about Pastor Wright is not his day-to-day political advice. He's much more of a sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible and that I'm not losing myself in some of the hype and hoopla and stress that's involved in national politics."
Obama's aides were not deluded, either. For months, they had tried to keep race in the background of the campaign, but they realized that Wright's sermons intensified it in the worst way possible and could even bring down Obama's candidacy. Jon Favreau, the lead speechwriter, learned the news about Wright and felt sick. Favreau channel-surfed for a while, and when he hit on the Wright clips, he thought, Oh, Jesus, this is going to be bad. The campaign put out a statement distancing Obama from the sermons but it was obvious that a more concerted effort was needed.
On Friday, the day after the ABC broadcast, Obama called David Axelrod and said that he wanted to give a speech on race. He had been thinking about it for months and had been talked out of it by the staff. Now it was an absolute necessity. In the meantime, though, he could not cancel a pair of trying appointments: he was scheduled to meet with the editorial boards of both the Tribune and the Sun-Times to talk about, and distance himself from, the developer Tony Rezko, who had been his friend and early campaign contributor and was now under indictment. At the Tribune session, Obama admitted that it had been "boneheaded" of him to go in on a deal with Rezko to buy his house when Rezko was so clearly mired in corruption. At the same session, Obama claimed that he hadn't been in church during the "offensive" sermons that had been excerpted on the air, and would have objected "fiercely" if he had been. Neither explanation was especially winning. The Wright situation was only going to fester.
"On Saturday morning we had ten people on a strategy conference call," Favreau said. "Axelrod said I should get started on something and I was like, no, I couldn't do it without [Obama]. But he was campaigning till ten-thirty that night. I went to the office and I was so panicked. I brain-stormed and met Ax there. We talked about what might be in the speech. And Ax said what he always says: 'He'll come up with the right thing and we'll have it.' Barack called me at home at ten, ten-thirty. I said, 'How are you?' and he was, like, 'You know, I've had better days, but, this is what you deal with when you run for President. I should be able to tell people this and explain what happened and say what I believe. And if it goes right it could be a teaching moment.' He said, 'I have thoughts, and I will tell them to you stream of consciousness and you type and you come up with a draft.' Well, his stream of consciousness was pretty much a first draft. It was more than he had ever given me before for a speech. He is known as an inspiring writer, but the lawyer in him was there, too. First this, then that: the logic of the speech was all there. And we talked about the ending, the story we told him about Ashley and the relish sandwiches. He had used it already at Ebenezer, Dr. King's church. We went back and forth on it, and we decided that even though he had used it before, it was too perfect. I worked all day Sunday on the structure, adding lines. At six, he e-mailed me and said he was going to put the girls to bed, he would send me something at eight. He was up until two or three and told me Monday that he made good progress and needed one more night and e-mailed it to me. He sent the speech to me, Valerie, Ax, Gibbs, and Plouffe. He said, 'Favs, if you have rhetorical or grammar stuff, O.K., but the rest of you, no substantial changes. This is what I want.' I had no idea how it was going to play, but I had never been so proud to be on this campaign."
On Tuesday, March 18th, Obama delivered his speech, "A More Perfect Union," at the National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia, on a stage adorned by a row of American flags. At stake was the candidacy of a man who, until this moment, had had an excellent chance to become the first African-American President.
African-American history is distinguished, in no small part, by a history of African-American rhetoric--speeches given at essential moments. In 1852, Frederick Douglass gave his Fourth of July speech at Corinthian Hall, in Rochester, New York, and his mood was one of defiance, an insistence that the majority population see the injustice staring it in the face: "What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim." Obama, who used to speak so admiringly of Douglass's rhetoric in his classes at the University of Chicago, could not now speak in the key of outrage. His tone had to be one of unity and embrace; he had to speak to, and reach, everyone--otherwise, his run for the Presidency was, quite possibly, at an end.
To begin, Obama called once more on his own biography as a form of authority in addressing the problem of race: "I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas.... I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners--an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles, and cousins, of every race and every hue." He gave his credentials. Now his capacity as a cultural linguist, a man who had lived in both worlds, white and black, and can speak to those worlds without a foreign accent, was to be tested.
After repeating his condemnation of Reverend Wright's sermons "in unequivocal terms," Obama tried to broaden the country's understanding of Wright's activities as pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ: Wright was a former Marine, he reminded the huge television audience, who had built a large and passionate ministry that represented "the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gangbanger." Obama disagreed with Wright's most inflammatory, indefensible remarks, which represented "a profoundly distorted view of this country." In his view, despair, the Biblically unforgivable sin, was at the heart of Wright's mistake. And it was a generational despair, the rage of an older man who failed to account for the way the racial situation had changed, at least to some degree, in America. Wright's "profound mistake," Obama said, was that "he spoke as if our society was static, as if no progress had been made." This is a gesture that the philosopher Richard Rorty discussed in his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country (the title comes from a phrase of James Baldwin's). The idea is that there is hope and inspiration to be found in the American past, not merely shame, and that hope is located in the evidence of our capacity to mobilize political and social movements to overcome grave injustice. Wright sees a static condition of outrageous oppression, while Obama sees one of progress and promise. He signals to the national audience that Wright is entangled in his own anger, though he refuses to condemn him outright:
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother--a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
Obama was engaged in a high-stakes rhetorical balancing act. He empathized not only with his embittered preacher but also with the embittered white workers who have seen "their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor" and cannot understand why their children might be bused across town or why a person of color has a leg up through affirmative action "because of an injustice that they themselves never committed." Obama indicated to all sides that he heard them, that he "got it." He spoke as a kind of racial Everyman. A white Southerner, even Bill Clinton, could not dare to do that in a speech on race, and Jesse Jackson, whose tradition had been more about the rhetoric of grievances and recompense, never would have chosen to. Obama's ability to negotiate among the sharply disparate perspectives of his fellow citizens was at the heart of his political impulse and his success. Perhaps when people spoke of Obama's "distance," they meant just this capacity to inhabit different points of view--a mastery that sometimes seemed more anthropological than political. Obama said that black anger about past and present wrongs was counterproductive, even a form of post-traumatic stress; he also pointed to the way that American politics had been shaped since the Nixon era by the exploitation of white anger in the South and elsewhere.
Finally, the speech was about the "unfinished" character of the American experiment and the need for unity--racial, religious, and generational--to fight injustice and move forward. To close the speech, he relied once more on the story of Ashley Baia, her trials as a girl, her idealism, and her unlikely recruitment of an elderly African-American to the campaign. ("I'm here because of Ashley.") That "moment of recognition," Obama said, "is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two hundred and twenty-one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins."
Obama's speech won praise in the leading newspapers (the New York Times editorial called it a "Profile in Courage"; the Washington Post labeled it "an extraordinary moment of truth-telling"). The right wing's response was equally unvaried: Rush Limbaugh sneeringly compared Obama to Rodney King; Newt Gingrich called it "intellectually, fundamentally, dishonest"; and many more, from Fred Barnes to Karl Rove and Joe Scarborough, adopted the trope that Obama had "thrown his grandmother under a bus."
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., told me the speech not only rescued the Obama candidacy, it made him think of Obama as a "post-modern Frederick Douglass":
For anthropologists, the mythical "trickster" figure reconciles two irreconcilable natures through mediation, like an animal joined with a man. Frederick Douglass is the figure of mediation in nineteenth-century American literature; he, the mulatto, mediates between white and black, slave and free, between "animal" and "man." Obama, as mulatto, as reconciler, self-consciously performs the same function in our time, remarkably self-consciously. And the comparisons don't stop there: they both launched their careers with speeches and their first books were autobiographies. They spoke and wrote themselves into being: tall, elegant, eloquent figures of mediation, conciliation, and compromise. Douglass launched his career as a radical no-holds-barred combatant against slavery. As he aged, however, he grew more conservative. He certainly believed in the basic class structure of American capitalism; and he believed in a natural aristocracy and that he was a member of it--just like Obama.
The only thing radical about Obama is that he wanted to be the first black President. In the race speech, he was performing the very opposite of "radical." He distanced himself, quite deftly, from radical black nationalism and embraced cosmopolitanism. He is certainly proud of his ethnic heritage, but in the manner of a "bourgeois nationalist" (as Eldridge Cleaver liked to say), the kind of person who hangs a Romare Bearden print on the wall and owns the complete Coltrane, but he doesn't want to be confined or defined entirely by his or her blackness. When he juxtaposes, rhetorically, his white grandmother with Jeremiah Wright as two examples of the wrong approach to race, he is doing this to show that he is our ultimate figure of mediation, standing tall above quarrels that most of us assume to be irreconcilable. And he does this for a larger political purpose. Like Douglass, he is a very gifted rhetorician; form and content are inextricably political for Barack Obama, from start to finish.
Further to the left, Cornel West, whom Obama had called an "oracle," was privately irritated with the speech, thinking that it was politically effective but "intellectually thin." He was especially angry that Obama had equated the oppression of blacks with white resentment. "I can understand that, the white moderates need that nice little massage and so on, but it has nothing to do with the truth, at all," West said many months later. "Do they have grounds for being upset? Absolutely. There have been excesses of affirmative action and so forth and so on, but Jim Crow de facto is still in place.... Who are the major victims of that? Poor, disproportionately, black and brown and red. You got to tell the truth, Barack. Don't trot out this shit with this coded stuff." But even West, who had promised Obama that he would be a "critical supporter," held his fire in public. "It was a very delicate moment," he said.
The speech was overall a success in the polls. Obama enhanced his stature while achieving the more immediate aim of putting distance between himself and his pastor. "The speech helped stanch a real frenzy," Axelrod said. "Barack turned a moment of great vulnerability into a moment of triumph. He said, 'I may lose, but I will have done something valuable.' He was utterly calm while everyone was freaking out. He said, 'Either they will accept it or they won't and I won't be President.' It was probably the most important moment of the whole campaign."
As important as the message was the tone of the messenger. Obama's personality served him well. The civil-rights-era activist Bob Moses, one of Obama's heroes, said, "His confidence in himself--and his peacefulness with himself--came through in a way that can't be faked. You are under too much pressure to actually adopt a persona. You can't do it under that pressure and not have it blown away. People said he couldn't afford to be the angry black candidate, but the point is that he is not angry. If he were angry, it would have come out." Indeed, in the sixties Moses, leading voter-registration drives in Mississippi, was known for those same qualities--his intelligence and his even temper.
Studs Terkel, who compiled oral histories about race and the Depression and was, at ninety-six, a Chicago institution, recalled the Philadelphia speech just a week before he died, in October, 2008, telling me that Obama's political calm under pressure reminded him of Gene Tunney, the heavyweight champion of the mid-nineteen-twenties, who used craft, more than brawn, to defeat Jack Dempsey. "The guys on the street, the mechanics and shoe clerks, saw Tunney as an intellectual, but he won," Terkel said. "Obama is like that. He's one cool fighter."
The speech in Philadelphia did more than change the subject. It not only gave a context to the Jeremiah Wright affair--at least, for those who were willing to be persuaded--but also positioned Obama himself as a historical advance, the focal point of a new era, embracing America itself for all its tribes, for all its historical enmities and possibilities. In effect, it congratulated the country for getting behind him. Wright, Jesse Jackson--they were leaders of the old vanguard. Obama would lead the new vanguard, the Joshua generation.
"He leaned in, and that's always kind of his tendency: if you see something coming at you, lean in," Valerie Jarrett said. She would have preferred that he not have had to give the speech, but, she said, "The American people listened more carefully, because we were in the midst of a crisis. I think if he'd given that same speech earlier, we probably wouldn't have had every single news outlet cover it and talk about it for the following five news cycles."
The crisis had not come at the worst time: the next primaries were not until April 22nd, in Pennsylvania (Hillary was favored to win), and May 6th, in Indiana and North Carolina. The speech stabilized Obama's standing in the polls.
It did not, however, stabilize the mood of Jeremiah Wright. Wright had known all along that his relationship with Obama would, at best, be tested by the campaign. But he deeply resented what had happened to him, to his family, and to his church. The media, he complained, had reduced his decades of sermons and work for social justice to an ugly caricature, portraying him as an "anti-American, radical, homo-loving, liberal-whatever minister that [Obama] sat under for twenty years." His e-mail was clogged with obscene and abusive messages. His office received death threats. The church received bomb threats. Police cars had to be parked outside the church, his house, his daughters' houses.
When Obama gave his speech in Philadelphia, Wright was with his wife, five children, son-in-law, and three grandchildren on a long-planned Caribbean cruise--a "cruise from hell," he called it. For the entire trip, cable news was looping reports about Wright. "Many of the white passengers on the boat were livid with me, saying ugly things to me and around me," Wright said after the election. "'You're unpatriotic, you oughta go back to Africa.'" Some people at the dining table next to Wright's asked to be moved. "I started staying in my cabin most of the time," Wright recalled, "except for dinner at night with my family, because to be out was going to invite comments that I didn't want my grandkids to hear." When the ship docked in Puerto Rico, Wright picked up a copy of the New York Times in which Maureen Dowd called him, indelibly, a "wackadoodle."
Wright was not at all shocked by Obama's speech, saying that it was what he had to do, as a politician, to stay in the race. But the idea that Obama was not "disowning" him was disingenuous. "You already did disown me," Wright said as if Obama were in the room. "And you're being forced into saying things that I would not say--but I'm not running for public office."
Obama, Wright said, sent him a text message wishing him a happy Easter. That hardly eased his upset with the speech, and its denunciation of his sermons. "I said to him, as soon as I got back, 'Not only haven't you heard the sermon, Barack, you're responding to news clips being looped on television,'" Wright said, recalling an hour-long private meeting with Obama at Wright's house. "You didn't read the sermon, that's certainly been in print since 2001. And it seems to me that the Harvard Law Review editor would at least read a sermon before he makes a pronouncement about it." Wright says that Obama apologized: "He said, 'You're right, I hadn't read the sermon, or heard it. And I was wrong.' But, I said, 'You're apologizing in my living room. You're busting me out internationally--over something you had not heard or read.'"
Wright's presumption was that his meanings had been radically distorted by the clips of his sermons that appeared on ABC and in the rest of the media, that somehow Obama and everyone else, if they only read or heard the full version, would share his wisdom. The truth is that while those sermons were, of course, more nuanced than any five-second excerpt could represent, Wright's rhetoric and his ferocious tone, on the subject of 9/11 and much else, were not something that the Obama campaign would put in a commercial.
According to Wright, Obama said he would greatly prefer that Wright stay at home and keep quiet through the rest of the campaign rather than continue to preach in Chicago and on the road. "He said, 'You know what your problem is, is you've got to tell the truth,'" Wright said. "I said, 'That's a good problem for me to have.' That's a good problem for all preachers to have.... He said, 'It's going to get worse if you go out there. It's really going to get worse.' And he was so right."
At around the same time, Wright said, he was getting messages from Joshua DuBois, a Pentecostal minister and the Obama campaign's religious affairs director, and from other aides and supporters, asking him not to preach and give interviews until after the election. One Obama supporter--"a close friend of Barack's," Wright claimed--even offered to send Wright money if he would only be quiet. Wright refused. He was retired now and needed to earn a living and help support grandchildren in college. "Where's the money going to come from?" he said. "I'm just going to be quiet until November the fifth? I'm not supposed to say a word? What do I tell these people who have invited me to preach? All of these dates between April and November? So, no, I didn't cancel engagements, and I didn't cancel what I was supposed to be doing."
Wright was simply not going to apologize for what he said were "snippets" taken out of proper context, and he resented deeply the media's "attempts to use me as a weapon of mass destruction."
"I'm not running for office," he said. "I don't have to win. I don't have to compromise in terms of trying to appease this faction to get their vote."
Any notion that the Jeremiah Wright affair had settled down died on April 28, 2008, when he accepted an invitation to speak at the National Press Club in Washington. Three nights before, in an interview with Bill Moyers on PBS, he had been calm and reasoned; a speech in Detroit was harsher, but got little attention. Wright was in Washington for the annual Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, a gathering of leaders of the black church. Before taking the stage at the National Press Club, he stood in a circle holding hands with six or seven close friends and colleagues, including Cornel West and the Reverend James Forbes, Jr., the pastor of Riverside Church in New York. Forbes prayed that Wright would perform well and keep his cool.
Wright began with a prepared speech about the history, thought, and diverse strands of the black church--the long history stretching from Africa to slavery, from Jim Crow to the present day. He talked about the prophetic tradition, with its roots in the book of Isaiah, the voices of protest during slavery and segregation and the black-liberation theology of James Cone. After completing his survey, Wright talked about his own church's tradition of protest against apartheid and other instances of injustice, as well as its support of programs for victims of H.I.V./AIDS, drug addicts and alcoholics, and troubled young people.
When Wright finished, Donna Leinwand, a reporter for USA Today and the vice-president of the National Press Club, had the unenviable task of reading to him written questions from the audience. The first question she read was about Wright's post-9/11 line that "America's chickens are coming home to roost."
"Have you heard the whole sermon?" Wright said.
Leinwand, of course, had not asked the question so much as relayed it, but Wright used her as his foil. When she asked a question about his patriotism, Wright, not without some justification, began to unwind:
"I served six years in the military. Does that make me patriotic? How many years did Cheney serve?"
Wright's demeanor began to change: he became more combative, more sarcastic, and started to perform in the broadest sense, clowning, rolling his eyes, preening for his friends and the camera. Applause rolled in from his colleagues and friends, including a number of ministers, the former Washington mayor Marion Barry, and Malik Zulu Shabazz, of the New Black Panther Party. Cornel West, for one, thought that Wright had begun well but now was starting to "disintegrate."
Asked about Louis Farrakhan, Wright said, "Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains, he did not put me in slavery, and he didn't make me this color."
More and more, Wright played to his supporters and mugged for the camera. The calm he had displayed with Moyers was gone; he clearly felt that the questions were unworthy and foolish and he answered in kind. When he was asked about the notion that the H.I.V. virus was invented as a weapon to be employed against people of color, Wright didn't deny it. Instead, he recommended Emerging Viruses, a self-published book by a conspiracy theorist and former dentist named Leonard G. Horowitz, who suggests that H.I.V. originated as a biological-weapons project. "Based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country," he said, "I believe our government is capable of doing anything."
From the Obama campaign's point of view, Wright's performance at the National Press Club was catastrophic. It was broadcast live and in full; there could be no complaints that Wright had been reduced to edited "snippets." Wright said that he was "playing the dozens" with people who had somehow shown him no respect, and yet it was obvious that his tone of contempt and mockery would do Obama no good. Wright, at this point, did not seem to care.
"We both know that if Senator Obama did not say what he said he would never get elected," Wright said at the Press Club. "Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls.... I do what pastors do, he does what politicians do. I'm not running for office." Then, as if to add an acid punctuation to his performance, he joked that maybe he would be Vice-President.
* * *
Obama had been campaigning in North Carolina when Wright appeared at the National Press Club. After being briefed, but without having seen the tape, Obama made a statement about Wright--"He does not speak for me"--at the Wilmington airport. Late that night, he watched Wright on cable television and realized that it had been even worse than Valerie Jarrett and other aides had suggested. Obama was devastated and felt a deep sense of betrayal.
"I don't know if we could have designed something as destructive" as Wright's appearance at the National Press Club, David Plouffe recalled. "It was like living in a 'Saturday Night Live' parody. I remember I was on the phone with Obama, describing what had happened, and we were both just very quiet. It was hard to believe that this was happening. It was emotionally very difficult for him."
As usual, Plouffe had taken the late-night call from Obama in the bathroom so that he wouldn't wake his wife. Finally, after a long, agonized conversation, Obama said that he would speak out. "I know what I need to say," he said. "You guys don't worry about it."
The next day, in Winston-Salem, Obama followed a town hall meeting with a pointed press conference. Looking stricken and grave, he said that Wright had offered a "different vision of America"--one that he did not share. He pronounced himself "outraged" by his pastor and his "divisive and destructive" comments, adding that they did not accurately represent the black church, much less his campaign. "And if Reverend Wright thinks that that's political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn't know me very well," Obama said. "And based on his remarks yesterday, well, I may not know him as well as I thought, either."
Lost in the furor was a clear picture of Jeremiah Wright himself. Intelligent yet given to conspiracy thinking, devoted yet erratic, he was many things at once: ambitious, compassionate, volatile, egocentric. Here was a man who had been at a pinnacle of his South Side domain. He was preparing for a triumphant retirement, handing over the leadership of a church that he had built from eighty-seven congregants to six thousand, just as his most famous parishioner was, quite possibly, headed toward the White House. He had done a great deal for a great many. Now he was demonized on television, with reporters asking him rude questions, strangers insulting him and harassing his family; and now, too, Obama was through with him. Wright's pride did not allow him to be silent until the end of the campaign; he did not think that he should have to. What had he ever done to Barack Obama except advise him, teach him, embolden his soul? That was how he saw it, anyway. Wright was wounded and weary. ("I'm a tired bastard," he said.) He knew well that he would forever be known for those moments on television, not for his good works. There was no way out of such a hole. And he could not help it if his view of Obama fluctuated from the tender to the furious, from the proud to the patronizing.
"Your children mess up, your children make mistakes, your children listen to bad advice--you don't stop loving your children," Wright told me. "Barack was like a son to me. I'm not going to stop loving him. I think he listened to the wrong people and made some bad choices.... As I said, he may have disowned me; I didn't disown him, and I won't disown him, because I love him. I still love him. I love him like I love my kids."
But the humiliation was deep. Northwestern University rescinded an honorary degree. Some speaking invitations were withdrawn. Wright said that the media hounded his youngest child at her senior prom and again when she moved into her dormitory at Howard University. "That's one of the reasons there's still the rawness and the pain," he said.
And yet he continued to make strange, sometimes hate-filled statements and speeches. Speaking at an N.A.A.C.P. dinner, Wright gave a pseudo-scientific disquisition on the genetic differences between African-American "right-brain" and European "left-brain" learning styles. At the point where he started talking about the different ways black people and white people clap their hands, their varying rhythmic capacities, it became possible to see a once-respected pastor coming undone. Interviewed by Cliff Kelley on WVON after the election, Wright revealed the depths of his hurt and resentment. He talked not only about the sins of the mass media but also recounted the names of the hip-hop artists and comedians who had criticized him. His hurt was palpable. "You've not only dissed me ... you have urinated on my tradition," Wright said. "You've urinated on my parents, my grandparents, and our whole faith tradition. I feel like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man."
During the primary debates, Obama had said that under the right conditions he would talk to any foreign leader--Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il--"but he can't talk to me," Wright said ruefully to Kelley. Even though Wright said that he had not disowned Obama, he now felt free to mock him. One of Obama's assets in the race had been his comfort in the church; now his pastor criticized him for his lack of devotion. "He doesn't have a church," he said. "He has a health club he goes to every morning, but he doesn't have a church he goes to every week. He's sort of churchless. He's taking care of his body."
Wright never seemed to get over his wounds, and, when he failed to watch himself, which was increasingly often, he said hateful things. As late as June, 2009, he bitterly told a newspaper in Virginia, the Daily Press, "Them Jews ain't going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter that he'll talk to me in five years when he's a lame duck, or in eight years when he's out of office." He also said that Jewish voters and "the AIPAC" vote were "controlling" Obama; they were persuading him not to send delegations to a conference on racism in Geneva because "they would not let him talk to someone who calls a spade what it is." With these flourishes, Wright made it a great deal more difficult to see, or care about, the complexity of his drama. His subsequent half-apologies betrayed only his regret that he had not used more euphemistic language. His parishioners, for the most part, would not stop loving him, they would not forget all the good he had done, but the rest of the world moved on.
For a few weeks after Wright's National Press Club appearance, Obama worried about the campaign's survival. He joked with his aides that he could always make speeches for money--he'd make as much as Bill Clinton!--and he could keep hanging around with his friends from the campaign. The gallows humor was understandable. The polls in North Carolina and, especially, Indiana, were not promising. Would Wright's behavior, his unwillingness to swallow his pride and stay quiet, be the end of the Obama campaign?
In the end, however, Obama won North Carolina by fourteen points, and he lost Indiana by just two points. The race for the Democratic nomination remained close to the end, but Obama never fell behind. That night, on NBC, Tim Russert declared, "We know who the Democratic nominee is going to be, and no one is going to dispute it." George Stephanopoulos, on ABC, and Bob Schieffer, on CBS, soon followed suit. Because Obama had proved his resiliency through the Wright affair and the balloting in North Carolina, the decisive super-delegates started to commit themselves to voting for him at the Convention. For a while, Hillary Clinton ignored reality and soldiered on.
In mid-June, Obama went to his friend Arthur Brazier's church, on the South Side, the Apostolic Church of God, and delivered a Father's Day speech. Thematically, Obama was repeating himself. Speaking both as a politician and as the child of a fatherless household, he had talked many times to audiences and journalists about the importance of family, responsibility, and fatherhood.
African-Americans, in general, welcome such sermons, and Obama was well received at Brazier's church, but, to some black intellectuals and activists, Obama was patronizing his audiences and minimizing the themes of institutionalized racism. The critique of Obama on this subject was similar to the critique of the comic Bill Cosby, who for many years had angered some black intellectuals with his lectures on black self-empowerment, families, fatherhood, and self-discipline. Michael Eric Dyson wrote in Time that while Obama had cited a Chris Rock comedy routine about black men expecting praise for things like staying out of jail, "Rock's humor is so effective because he is just as hard on whites as on blacks. That's a part of the routine Obama has not yet adopted." The novelist Ishmael Reed pointed out that the polls now showed Obama with a fifteen-point lead over the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain. "It's obvious by now that Barack Obama is treating black Americans like one treats a demented uncle, brought out from his room to be ridiculed and scolded before company from time to time," Reed wrote, adding that the Father's Day speech was "meant to show white conservative males," who had failed to vote for him in the primaries, "that he wouldn't cater to 'special interest' groups, blacks in this case."
Glenn Loury, a prominent black economist, who grew up in Chicago, said, "It wasn't that he was wrong or off base, nor was it a washing of dirty linen in public, but I thought that he was talking over the audience to the rest of the country and using the fact of his 'courage' to say these things to convey to the rest of the country that he shares our values despite the doubts we might have had about him."
On July 6th, Jesse Jackson, who had been fairly quiet during the long campaign, was preparing to appear on Fox television when an open mike recorded him criticizing Obama for his "faith-based" speech on Father's Day at Apostolic. Speaking softly to another guest, Jackson also said that Obama had been "talking down to black people." He made a slicing gesture with his hand and said, "I wanna cut his nuts out."
What seemed to irritate Jackson and many others was the potential for a double discourse, the way that Obama's rhetoric was being overheard by white audiences that might understand it not as brotherly sympathy but, rather, as lofty reproach. "Barack would go to various groups and spell out public policy," Jackson told me. "He'd go to Latino groups and the conversation would be about the road to citizenship and immigration policy. He'd go to women and talk about women's rights, Roe v. Wade. But he'd gone to several black groups talking about responsibility, which is an important virtue that should be broadly applied, but, given our crisis, we need government policy, too. African-Americans are No. 1 in voting for him, because he excited people, but we're also No. 1 in infant mortality, No. 1 in shortness of life expectancy, No. 1 in homicide victims."
Fox played the tape on the air, and Jackson came in for a few days of comprehensive bashing. The ritual played itself out: Jackson apologized. This, in turn, allowed Obama to accept the apology. Jackson looked petty and jealous. Obama looked magnanimous. Once more, a distance between the two men was established.
"I was shocked by the language, but I knew Jesse had the feeling that Obama played to white Americans by criticizing black Americans, for not doing enough to help ourselves," Julian Bond said. "Whether he intended it, I don't know, but I am sure Jesse provided Obama that sort of Sister Souljah moment."
Even many of Obama's early critics acquired a grudging respect for his cool strategic sense, his tactical agility. Tavis Smiley, who went on attacking Obama for "pivoting" on issues like gun control and the death penalty and who absorbed enormous criticism for doing so, was among those who now saw the promise in him. Throughout the campaign, Smiley, like his mentor Cornel West, kept in touch with Obama. "Each time Obama and I talked during the campaign, maybe a half-dozen times on the phone," he said, "we aired our positions and differences, but it always ended with him saying, 'Tavis, I gotta do what I gotta do and I respect the fact that you have to do what you have to.' We confirm our love for each other and then we hang up." Obama did not, and could not, represent the prophetic tradition: he was not Frederick Douglass or Bishop Turner, Dr. King or Malcolm X. He could borrow their language, he could take inspiration from their examples, but he was a pragmatist, a politician. To change anything, he needed to win. The romancing of Tavis Smiley was a small part of that effort.
The acrimony inside the Clinton campaign never eased. The enmity between the chief strategist, Mark Penn, and Harold Ickes was only the most vividly bitter relationship in a thoroughly dysfunctional organization. Ickes, a liberal with a decades-long relationship with the Clintons, resented Penn for his centrist politics and big-business ties and viewed him as incompetent; Penn was convinced that Ickes contributed only back-biting and rancor to the campaign. At one point in the campaign, Hillary Clinton had presided over a regular strategy meeting at her house on Embassy Row, on Whitehaven Street, in Washington. Around fifteen senior advisers were seated at a long table, with Clinton at the head, Penn at her side. Toward the end of the meeting, she said with frustration, "O.K., then, what's my message?"
The question seemed shocking to some in the room, but Penn forged ahead, rambling on about "Right from Day One" and other rubrics of the campaign. No one else had much to offer.
"Suddenly, Hillary got this sad, faraway look," one of the advisers recalled. "And she said, almost plaintively, 'Well, when you figure it out, someone give me a call.' She felt let down, betrayed, and there was good reason for her to feel that way. But she hired every f*cking one of us, and it was one of the weakest political staffs I've ever seen." Throughout the campaign, Clinton expressed frustration with each of her leading aides, and had to fire her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, but the adviser was right--she had chosen every one of them.
By June, 2008, the long battle between Clinton and Obama was over. Clinton, for her part, tried, fitfully at first, to reconcile herself to reality and move forward--possibly at the side of her antagonist. In some private meetings, however, she revealed her lingering sense of injury. Both her campaign and her husband had failed to perform with any consistency. She was angry with the press, which, she felt, had valorized Obama and punished her for their own weariness with the Clinton saga since 1992 and for every misstep in the campaign, real or perceived. She even made clear to some people that her team had early knowledge of Jeremiah Wright's sermons and Obama's extraordinarily close relationship with the preacher. What if she had had such a friendship? What would the press have said about her? And yet, she said with some bitterness, she got no credit for holding back. Only her husband's sense of umbrage was greater.
Sometimes Hillary Clinton's anger could quiet a room with its intensity, but as the weeks passed that sense of outrage turned to a desire to survive in the new order. It was no secret to Clinton that she was being considered for Vice-President or a top Cabinet position.
It took a while longer, however, for the top aides on both sides to cool down. "The Obama people were so angry at us, they thought that we had gone too far, that there had been race-baiting," one Clinton aide said. "I thought that enmity would last a really long time. I was angry and so were a lot of other people about how we were treated. There was no sense immediately afterward of 'Good game, well played.' No, it was 'We really took those f*ckers down. We retired the Clintons to the trash heap of history.'
"Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama took a lot longer to get over it," the aide continued. "They are protective, competitive spouses, and for them to get over these compounding slights wasn't easy. Michelle clearly had a generalized feeling by the end of the campaign that we had run a race-baiting campaign. I don't think Obama himself did--or not nearly as much."
David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager, admitted that he had been furious, in the latter stages of the primaries, that Clinton seemed to live in an "alternate universe" in which she still thought victory possible. Plouffe continued to be resentful long after the contest was over. "I'm a warrior, so it was hard for me to put down the sword," he said.
The relatively relaxed period of the summer of 2008 allowed that enmity to exhaust itself, and, by late August, when the Democratic Party gathered in Denver for its Convention, a sense of comity, be it sincere or forced, was in place. The Clintons both gave conciliatory, supportive speeches in favor of the nominee and Obama was free to concentrate on kicking off his national campaign against John McCain and the Republicans.
On the afternoon of August 28th Obama was rehearsing his acceptance speech in a modest meeting room on the nineteenth floor of the Westin Tabor Center, the hotel where he was staying in Denver. In a few hours, he was to appear under the lights at Mile High Stadium. Obama has always preferred to work in the nest of a very small circle of aides and now his audience was three: his political strategist, David Axelrod; the speechwriter, Jon Favreau; and a teleprompter operator. The rehearsal was mainly an exercise in comfort, in making sure that there were no syntactical hurdles left in the text, no barriers to clarity. Obama was never spirited in rehearsal, but he wanted to make sure he had a firm grasp of the rhythm of the sentences, so that when he looked at the teleprompter he would be like a well-rehearsed musician glancing at the score.
As a piece of rhetoric, the Convention speech was more of a ramble and a litany than what Obama usually favored; the text carried the burden of presenting a bill of particulars, a case, as Favreau put it, "of why yes to Obama and no to John McCain." Obama could not just inspire; he had to answer detailed questions of policy and difference. Late in the speech, however, the rhetoric shifted to the historical uplift and significance of the campaign. In the rehearsal session, Obama came to a passage paying homage to the March on Washington, forty-five years earlier to the day, when tens of thousands of people gathered near the Lincoln Memorial to "hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream." Obama chose not to mention Martin Luther King, Jr., by name in the text, and, later, some black intellectuals would say that he had done so for fear of appearing "too black," of emphasizing race in front of a national audience. And yet even as he rehearsed the passage, there was a catch in Obama's voice and he stopped. He couldn't get past the phrase "forty-five years ago."
"I gotta take a minute," Obama told his aides.
He excused himself and took a short, calming walk around the room. "This is really hitting me," he said. "I haven't really thought about this before really deeply. It just hit me. I guess this is a pretty big deal."
His eyes filling with tears, Obama went to the bathroom to blow his nose. Favreau thought that the only time he had ever seen or heard of Obama being this emotional was back in Iowa when he addressed a group of young volunteers who were caucusing for the first time. Axelrod agreed. "Usually, he is so composed," he said, "but he needed the time."
"It's funny, I think all of us go through this," Favreau recalled. "We've gone through this whole campaign and, contrary to what anyone might think, we don't think of the history much, because it's a crazy environment and you're going twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And so there are very few moments--and I think it's the same with Barack--when he stops and thinks, 'I could be the first African-American elected President.'"
Obama returned to the room and practiced the paragraph a couple more times to make sure he could get through it without interruption. Although the passage did not mention King by name, the references were unmistakable.
Early in the evening, before the motorcade left for the stadium, Obama called Favreau in his room to go over some stray detail in the speech about science policy.
"I'm just being nervous, aren't I?" Obama asked him.
Sometime after five, Obama left the hotel in a motorcade. The drive lasted about fifteen minutes and all he could see through the window was faces, crowds, signs, people ten deep cheering and yelling, and the roar grew louder as he pulled into the stadium to deliver his acceptance speech to eighty thousand people and a television audience of more than thirty-eight million Americans.