Part Five
Your door is shut against my tightened face,
And I am sharp as steel with discontent;
But I possess the courage and the grace
To bear my anger proudly and unbent.
--Claude McKay, "The White House" (1922)
This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.
--James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
Chapter Sixteen
"How Long? Not Long"
In the traditional rhythm of American presidential politics, the general-election drama begins after the Democratic and Republican Conventions and the Labor Day weekend. But that nicety was abandoned by both parties long ago. John McCain and his spokesmen spent much of the summer sniping at their putative opponent, laying the groundwork for a campaign that questioned, again and again, the worth and credentials of Barack Obama. Is he ready? Is he trustworthy? What has he ever done?
From the start, McCain salted legitimate contention with dubious insinuation. On October 6th, at a rally in Albuquerque, after suggesting that his opponent had taken "illegal foreign funds from Palestinian donors," McCain asked, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" When his aides charged--falsely--that Obama had willfully "snubbed" wounded American veterans at a base in Germany while making his triumphant summer visit to Europe, they stood their ground even after the charge had been disproved. They told a reporter for the Washington Post that they were intent on creating a "narrative" about Obama's supposed "indifference toward the military"--just the sort of meme, they thought, that would work for McCain, who had been shot down and wounded in Vietnam and spent nearly six years in a North Vietnamese prison camp. Obama, one McCain ad said, "made time to go to the gym" in Europe but not to visit the wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan in a German hospital.
When Obama told the St. Petersburg Times that McCain was trying to "scare" voters because "I don't look like I came out of central casting when it comes to Presidential candidates," McCain, affecting startled offense, charged reverse racism. "His comments were clearly the race card," McCain said. And yet as McCain spoke, his hesitant speech and body language betrayed his own ambivalence. McCain's most painful memory from the 2000 Presidential campaign was of the Bush machine smearing him and his family during the South Carolina primary; pro-Bush operatives used robo-calls and flyers to spread rumors that McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock and that he had been a traitor in Vietnam. After McCain lost that race, he told his supporters that he wanted the Presidency "in the best way--not the worst way," and that he would never "dishonor the nation I love or myself by letting ambition overcome principle. Never. Never. Never." Now, in 2008, it seemed obvious that McCain felt distaste, or worse, for what he himself was doing in the name of electoral advantage. He paused uncomfortably and then seemed to sputter when he talked about Obama's supposed dealing of the race card. His moral resolve had receded in the face of ambition, and the internal struggle was both pitiful and visible.
The story is not simple. McCain did tell his advisers that it would be wrong and counterproductive to try to use Jeremiah Wright against Obama. But his instructions were circumscribed. Conservative surrogates of all kinds, ranging from right-wing authors to McCain's own Vice-Presidential nominee were only too pleased to do the dirty work--the sort of work that McCain had denounced eight years before.
In the summer weeks leading up to the Conventions, the No. 1 New York Times nonfiction best-seller was a scurrilous exercise called The Obama Nation. The author was Jerome R. Corsi, who, in the previous election cycle, had won a measure of fame as the co-writer of a highly effective piece of hardcover anti-Kerry propaganda called Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. In Vietnam, Kerry had won a Bronze Star, a Silver Star, and three Purple Hearts before coming home to speak out against the war in Congress and in the media, and yet the book managed to discredit him for many voters as a military fraud. Meanwhile, George W. Bush, who avoided Vietnam, sat back and watched the results add up in his electoral column.
Corsi, by any fair accounting, was a bigot, a liar, and a conspiracy theorist. Online, he had called Hillary Clinton a "fat hog" and "a lesbo," branded Islam "a worthless, dangerous Satanic religion," denounced Pope John Paul II as a "senile" apologist for "boy buggering," and charged that the World Trade Center towers had actually been destroyed by means other than hijacked airplanes. The Obama Nation was the kind of pernicious, unhinged production that was once the specialty of the John Birch Society. Such books, however, long ago went mainstream and insinuated themselves into the blogosphere and cable television where, of course, Corsi was a frequent guest. In a tendentious pseudo-scholarly tone, he marshaled clippings and bogus evidence to "prove" that Obama was a corrupt, unpatriotic, foreign-born, drug-dealing, Muslim-mentored non-Christian socialist elitist, who plagiarized his speeches, lied about his past, and found his closest associates among dangerous former Communists and terrorists. Corsi's subtitle was "Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality." Corsi advertised the fact that he had a doctorate in political science from Harvard--his byline is "Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D."--and so he must have known that the phrase "cult of personality" was not something from "Entertainment Tonight"; it was the phrase that Nikita Khrushchev had used to denounce Stalin for the purges and for the murder of millions of Soviet citizens.
Corsi was not a basement-dwelling marginal. He had mainstream backing. His publisher was Threshold Editions, a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster whose chief editor was Mary Matalin, a Bush-family confidante and a former aide to Dick Cheney; Matalin had also been chief of staff to Lee Atwater when he ran the Republican National Committee.
Corsi was not alone in his efforts to reduce Obama to an alien figure with a shadowy background and pernicious intentions. Similar descriptions and "evidence" were everywhere on right-wing Web sites, talk shows, and news shows, particularly on Fox. Opinion polls showed that an alarming percentage of the American public believed at least some of it, particularly the idea that Obama was lying about his religion.
The Obama campaign countered the myths and lies on its Web site with a running feature called "Fight the Smears." But the corrosive effect of these untruths on public opinion was impossible to ignore. In mid-July, during the pre-Convention lull in the campaign, The New Yorker published a cover parodying the libels against Obama with the aim of making them ridiculous; the cover image, by Barry Blitt, showed the Obamas in the Oval Office with an American flag crisping in the fireplace, a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the mantel, Michelle dressed as a sixties-era militant, and Obama as a turbaned Muslim. For years, Blitt had been drawing covers mocking the Bush Administration--he and the magazine itself were clearly unsympathetic to the conservative right--but the Obama campaign declared that the cover was in "bad taste" and thousands of people wrote to the magazine, and to me, its editor, in protest. Most of the people who wrote expressed the opinion that while they, of course, understood the intent of the image, they were worried that it could inflame the bigoted sentiments of others and hurt Obama.
In early October, Sean Hannity broadcast a multipart series on Fox called "Obama & Friends: A History of Radicalism." Like Corsi, Hannity played an extended game of guilt by association and drive-by character assassination, suggesting that Obama was connected to Louis Farrakhan; a supporter of socialist revolution in the mode of Hugo Chavez; and close to Rashid Khalidi, a distinguished professor of Middle Eastern politics whom Hannity characterized as "an allegedly former member of a terror organization." In all, Hannity concluded, "Obama's list of friends reads like a history of radicalism."
By the fall of 2008, the leaders of the McCain campaign harbored the sense that they were playing in an unfair contest. They felt both wounded and self-righteously furious that McCain no longer won plaudits, as he had in 2000, for candor, wry amiability, and intellectual suppleness. Like Bill and Hillary Clinton, McCain thought of Obama as a talented speaker but a callow politician, serenely entitled, lucky beyond measure.
McCain's appeal and his sense of himself were based on the values of honor, self-sacrifice, and service. "It is your character, and your character alone, that will make your life happy or unhappy," he wrote in one of his best-selling collaborations with his senior aide, Mark Salter. The many Democrats, moderates, and journalists who had expressed admiration for him in 2000 pointed both to his unquestionable valor and sacrifice in Vietnam and to his willingness to fight his own party on tobacco, tax cuts for the wealthy, campaign finance, secret "earmarks" for local pork projects, and other issues. In those days, he was so independent that he entertained the idea of leaving the Republican Party. After losing to Bush, McCain flirted with a variety of fates: joining the Democrats, creating a third party modeled on Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party, and, in 2004, joining his friend John Kerry on the Democratic ticket. He remained a Republican.
But now the McCain people found to their chagrin that they no longer possessed the non-ideological glamour that had once had columnists aching to ride on McCain's bus, the Straight Talk Express, and that led the novelist David Foster Wallace to write a long admiring profile of McCain as an "anti-candidate" in Rolling Stone. Why had Obama monopolized the affections of the press corps? McCain's people asked. What sacrifices had Obama ever made? When had he ever risked the displeasure of his own Party, much less his own ambitions? They saw Obama as the ultimate Ivy League yuppie meritocrat--young, talented, effete, impertinent, unbruised, untested, and undeservedly self-possessed. Where were the scars? It was a familiar generational dynamic with the added element of race.
Mark Salter claimed that the press was enamored of Obama because of an urge to participate in the historic narrative of the rise of an African-American President; as a result, he said, it forgave or ignored his every fault and exaggerated McCain's. Salter was especially insistent on telling reporters about McCain's right-mindedness on race. He reminded reporters about how McCain had campaigned in Memphis in a driving rain to address a black audience. The message was: Even if I am not your candidate, if I win, I will be your President. Outside the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. King was slain in 1968, McCain told voters that he had made a mistake twenty-five years earlier when he voted against making King's birthday a national holiday.
"We went to great lengths to avoid pushing the rumors about Obama or trying to scare people, but McCain didn't get an ounce of f*cking credit for it," Salter said. "The press was smitten with a candidate and was determined to see him win. Where were the investigative pieces? We must have had fifty. Where was the press on Obama or Axelrod? There was nothing! My personal view is that reporters had to rationalize a dislike for McCain that they hadn't had before. They had to conjure it."
As early as 2006, when McCain accepted an invitation to speak at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, he made it plain that he was no longer looking to run a maverick campaign. In 2000, McCain had called Falwell one of the "agents of intolerance," but now he was assembling a Republican majority and needed the votes of the Christian right.
Jon Stewart, the host of "The Daily Show," had said in 2000 that he would have voted for McCain had he won the Republican nomination, but now he invited him on the show and said that the speech at Liberty University "strikes me as something you wouldn't ordinarily do. Are you going into crazy base world?"
McCain paused, smiled, and said sheepishly, "I'm afraid so."
McCain's sense of injury was even less easy to credit when he nominated Sarah Palin to be his running mate and dispatched her to be an assault-weapon-in-chief. At rallies, Palin raised the specter of one of Corsi's main arguments proving Obama's supposed radicalism--his "relationship" with the former Weatherman Bill Ayers. "Our opponent," she said, "is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country."
It was a brilliantly ominous formulation. Ayers went unnamed, allowing the listener to wonder who exactly these plural "terrorists" were. The phrase "targeted their own country" sounded like some sort of link with domestic sleeper agents.
Palin was not alone in the effort. McCain himself asked that Obama come clean about his closeness to a "washed-up terrorist." He also questioned his opponent's patriotism, saying that Obama would prefer to "lose a war in order to win a political campaign."
Ayers wasn't the only weapon in the arsenal. McCain, using the same kind of robo-calls that had been deployed against him eight years earlier in South Carolina, promoted the message that Obama had urged doctors not to treat "babies born alive after surviving attempted abortions." McCain not only hired consultants in the Karl Rove circle; he embraced the universe of the Bush Administration--precisely when it was in the process of imploding. The spectacle of McCain's confusion, his courtship of right-wing evangelists, free-market absolutists, and other conservatives new to his world would have been pitiable had it not been so dangerous.
After Palin started linking Obama to "terrorists" and McCain, too, did his own part to rub the magic lantern with speeches and television ads, the crowds at rallies began shouting "Terrorist!" and "Murderer!" and "Off with his head!" These were isolated outbursts, yet they so rattled McCain that he finally had to declare that Obama was, in fact, an honorable man. When a woman asking a question at a town-hall meeting informed McCain that Obama was an "Arab," McCain finally interrupted her, saying, "No, ma'am. He's a decent family man." (As if this were the opposite of "Arab.") At a rally in Lakeville, Minnesota, McCain said, "I will respect him, and I want everyone to be respectful." McCain's supporters rewarded him with boos. If McCain ever thought that he could take a middle road, asserting that he was firmly against slanderous appeals but also delegating Palin to rouse the worst suspicions among "the base," he was now disabused of that illusion.
McCain quickly became used to the criticism of countless commentators and some former military and political allies, but one attack truly hurt. In Why Courage Matters (2004), McCain and Salter had written about the bravery and patriotism of John Lewis, in Selma in 1965, and at many other civil-rights demonstrations. Now, a month before the election, Lewis issued a harsh statement saying that McCain and Palin were "sowing the seeds of hatred and division":
During another period, in the not too distant past, there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a Presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.
Lewis warned that McCain and Palin were "playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all." McCain issued a statement saying that Lewis's attack was "brazen and baseless," but it was clear to everyone on his campaign bus that he was deeply disturbed by the incident.
Ayers, for his part, had avoided reporters ever since his name first started appearing in the press during the campaign. Now in his sixties, he was unrepentant about his past in the Weather Underground, justifying his support for violence as a response to the slaughter in Vietnam. While Ayers had, for decades, been living an ordinary life as an educator, he had said reprehensible things as a young man. In 1974, for instance, he had dedicated a revolutionary manifesto called "Prairie Fire" to a range of radicals, including Harriet Tubman--but had also added the name of Robert Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan. Much of the Chicago academic establishment now showed its support for Ayers--even Richard M. Daley commended him for his good works in education--but Palin and the McCain campaign knew that by linking Obama to Ayers they could cast doubt on Obama's loyalties, his character, and his past. Obama was never remotely a radical; as a student, lawyer, professor, and politician he had always been a gradualist--liberal in spirit, cautious in nature. Obama was disingenuous when he described Ayers merely as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," but the idea that they were ever close friends or shared political ideas was preposterous.
"I think my relationship with Obama was probably like that of thousands of others in Chicago and, like millions and millions of others, I wished I knew him better," Ayers said, when my colleague Peter Slevin and I talked to him at his house on Election Day. Ayers said that while he wasn't bothered by the many threats--"and I'm not complaining"--the calls and e-mails he received had been "pretty intense." "I got two threats in one day on the Internet," he said, referring to an incident that took place the previous summer when he was sitting in his office at the University of Illinois-Chicago, where he has taught education for two decades. "The first one said that there was a posse coming to shoot me, and the second said that they were going to kidnap me and water-board me." During the general-election campaign, Ayers's alderman, Toni Preckwinkle, called him to say the threats were so serious that she would have police squad cars patrol by his house periodically. When he spoke at Millersville University, in Pennsylvania, he was told that there had been threats against him, and police with bomb-sniffing dogs patrolled outside the hall.
Ayers seemed unfazed by what he called "the Swiftboating" process of the 2008 campaign. "It's all guilt by association," he said. "They made me into a cartoon character--they threw me up onstage just to pummel me. I felt from the beginning that the Obama campaign had to run the Obama campaign and I have to run my life." Ayers said that once his name became part of the campaign maelstrom he never had any contact with the Obama circle. "That's not my world," he said.
One endorsement that the Obama campaign did want was that of General Colin Powell. Just as the Kennedy-family endorsement was a boon during the primary campaign, an endorsement from Powell would help among centrist Republicans and independents. Powell had left the Bush Administration, in 2005, after serving as Secretary of State, and had revealed his political hand discreetly since then, sometimes through background interviews with favored journalists, sometimes through former aides. But in the past year he had been unable to avoid mention of the Presidential race. When Obama was deciding whether to run, Powell had met with him and assured him that the country was ready to vote for a black President. Powell watched the campaign closely and, in June, in the space of a week, met with both Obama and John McCain. "I told them the concerns I had with each of their campaigns," Powell recalled, "and I told them what I liked about them. I said, 'I'm going to be watching.'"
In 1995, with his reputation burnished by the first Gulf War, and long before it was tarnished by the second, Powell had been uniquely positioned to become the first African-American President. His reputation as a soldier and as an adviser to Presidents had been, for millions of Americans, unimpeachable, and his life story, as he described it in his autobiography, My American Journey, was no less appealing, if less tortured, than Obama's in Dreams from My Father. Powell put himself forward in the old-fashioned way: the man of accomplishment "who just happens to be black."
For a few weeks, as his book sat atop the best-seller lists, Powell discussed a run for the 1996 Republican nomination with his family and his inner circle of aides and friends. Bill Clinton, a popular President, was running for a second term, but Clinton, political tacticians believed, lacked Powell's particular strengths: his maturity, his solidity in foreign affairs. In a center-right country, the scenario went, Powell could beat the incumbent. But there were considerations that went beyond polls. "Some in my family, in my circle of acquaintances, were concerned that, as a black person running for office, you're probably at greater personal risk than you might be if you were a white person," Powell told me. "But I've been at risk many times in my life, and I've been shot at, even."
Powell thought about the question for a few weeks and then, he said, he realized, "What are you doing? This is not you. It had nothing to do with race. It had to do with who I am, a professional soldier, who really has no instinct or gut passion for political life. The determining factor was I never woke up a single morning saying, 'Gee, I want to go to Iowa.' It was that simple. So the race thing was there, and I would've been the first prominent African-American candidate, but the reality is that the whole family, but especially me, had to look in the mirror and say, 'Is this what you really think you would be good at? And do you really want to do it?' And the answer was no."
Powell saw the campaign unfold over the summer of 2008, and, increasingly, he was dismayed by the ugly rhetoric on the Republican side. "It wasn't just John," Powell said. "Frankly, very often it wasn't John; it was some sheriff in Florida introducing--I can't remember who the guy was introducing, whether it was Governor Palin or John--who said, 'Barack Hussein Obama.' That's all code words. I know what he's saying: 'He's a Muslim, and he's black.'"
Finally, just two weeks before Election Day, Powell chose to accept a standing invitation from NBC and Tom Brokaw. He appeared on "Meet the Press," on Sunday morning, October 19th.
Powell prepared thoroughly for the appearance. Clearly, Brokaw knew what was coming; he had only to ask the obvious question and sit back. Powell, for his part, had suffered politically. He felt that Bush and Cheney had used him to sell the invasion of Iraq; that he had gone to the United Nations to speak out on Iraqi military capability equipped, as it turned out, with bogus intelligence. With a keen sense of how to deal, publicly and not, with the Washington press, Powell had, for decades, been a master of his own image--his fingerprints were all over Bob Woodward's books going back to the Administration of George H. W. Bush--but now he knew that he had to repair his reputation. His appearance on "Meet the Press" was a matter not only of expressing a preference but of making a comeback in the public eye. In his long, perfectly formed answer--more a soliloquy than a reply--Powell was careful not to alienate Republicans or insult McCain, but was also clear about the future:
On the Republican side over the last seven weeks, the approach of the Republican Party and Mr. McCain has become narrower and narrower. Mr. Obama, at the same time, has given us a more inclusive, broader reach into the needs and aspirations of our people. He's crossing lines--ethnic lines, racial lines, generational lines. He's thinking about, all villages have values, all towns have values, not just small towns have values.
Powell even questioned why surrogates for the Republican Party were trying to exploit the Ayers "issue," such as it was:
Why do we have these robo-calls going on around the country trying to suggest that because of this very, very limited relationship that Senator Obama has had with Mr. Ayers, somehow, Mr. Obama is tainted? What they're trying to do is connect him to some kind of terrorist feelings. And I think that's inappropriate....
So, when I look at all of this and I think back to my Army career, we've got two individuals. Either one of them could be a good President. But which is the President that we need now? Which is the individual that serves the needs of the nation for the next period of time? And I come to the conclusion that because of his ability to inspire, because of the inclusive nature of his campaign, because he is reaching out all across America, because of who he is and his rhetorical abilities--and we have to take that into account, as well as his substance; he has both style and substance--he has met the standard of being a successful President, being an exceptional President. I think he is a transformational figure. He is a new generation coming into the world, onto the world stage, onto the American stage. And for that reason I'll be voting for Senator Barack Obama.
Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama was, for some Republicans, like Kenneth Duberstein, Ronald Reagan's last chief of staff, "the Good Housekeeping seal of approval." In the days that followed, the calls, letters, and e-mails that Powell received were mostly positive. The Pakistanis in his local supermarket appreciated what he had to say about the use of "Arab" or "Muslim" as a pejorative. Some critics said that his endorsement of Obama was an act of "disloyalty and dishonor." Rush Limbaugh was only the loudest of the right-wing voices who denounced him. Limbaugh felt no compunction about saying that Powell's only reason for endorsing Obama was race.
Powell received some racist letters, but they were generally unsigned and had no return address. "I've faced this in just about everything I've ever done in my public life," he said to me. "It's there in America, and it can't be denied that there are people like this."
Powell said that Obama had run a completely new kind of campaign when it came to race. "Shirley [Chisholm] was a wonderful woman, and I admire Jesse [Jackson] and all of my other friends in the black community," he said, "but I think Obama should not be just--well, 'They were black, and he's black, therefore they're his predecessors.'
"Here's the difference in a nutshell, and it's an expression that I've used throughout my career--first black national-security adviser, first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs, first black Secretary of State. What Obama did--he's run as an American who is black, not as a black American. There's a difference. People would say to me, 'Gee, it's great to be the black Secretary of State,' and I would blink and laugh and say, 'Is there a white one somewhere? I am the Secretary of State, who happens to be black.' Make sure you understand where you put that descriptor, because it makes a difference. And I faced that throughout my career. You know, 'You're the best black lieutenant I've ever seen.' 'Thank you very much, sir, but I want to be the best lieutenant you've ever seen, not the best black lieutenant you've ever seen.' Obama has not shrunk from his heritage, his culture, his background, and the fact that he's black, as other blacks have. He ran honestly on the basis of who he is and what he is and his background, which is a fascinating background, but he didn't run just to appeal to black people or to say a black person could do it. He's running as an American."
Powell's "happens to be black" terminology was not quite in synch with how Obama saw his campaign, but, like Obama, he rejected the notion that victory would signal the rise of a "post-racial" period in American history. "No!" he said. "It just means that we have moved farther along the continuum that the Founding Fathers laid out for us two hundred and thirty-odd years ago. With each passing year, with each passing generation, with each passing figure, we move closer and closer to what America can be. But, no matter what happens in the case of Senator Obama, there are still a lot of black kids who don't see that dream there for them."
Not long before Election Day, as the American financial system reached a state of such extreme crisis that there was talk of a second Great Depression, Obama's lead over McCain widened. McCain had not been able to distance himself effectively from the Bush Presidency, and his confused performance during the financial crisis, his muddled and fleeting proposal that the Presidential campaign be suspended to allow all parties to concentrate on remedies for the banking disaster, was now hurting him further. Moreover, in the debates Obama had performed evenly, soberly, consistently, while, at times, McCain reinforced the cartoon of himself as obstreperous and too old for the job. Nearly all the polls showed Obama winning the debates, and that too helped bolster his growing lead.
There was also little doubt that one large non-voting constituency favored Obama: the rest of the world. In a poll conducted by the BBC World Service in twenty-two countries, respondents preferred Obama to McCain by a four-to-one margin. Nearly half the respondents said that if Obama became President it would "fundamentally change" their perception of the United States.
With Obama now ahead in the polls, I visited New Orleans, the ruined landscape that will forever be associated with the Bush Presidency. The last time I was there the city had been underwater. This was not the scene of heavy campaigning. Obama had pledged to run a fifty-state strategy, but even his enormous war chest would not pay for futility. The state went for Bush in 2000 and 2004 and was headed for McCain in 2008. Nevertheless, African-Americans in New Orleans--in Treme, in Mid-City, in the Lower Ninth--watched Obama's campaign obsessively. They listened to Tom Joyner, on WYLD; Michael Baisden, on KMEZ; Jamie Foxx, on Sirius. On Canal Street, vendors sold the same Obama T-shirts that I'd seen on 125th Street, in Harlem. The most popular paired Obama and Martin Luther King. Kids who would normally wear oversized throwback sports jerseys now wore Obama paraphernalia instead. There were Obama signs in the windows of barbershops, seafood and po'boy joints, and people's homes.
One night, I went out for a beer with Wendell Pierce, a New Orleanian who made his name as an actor playing the homicide cop Bunk Moreland on "The Wire," Obama's favorite television show. Pierce is in his mid-forties. His parents' neighborhood, Pontchartrain Park, was destroyed by Katrina, and he had spent months trying to redevelop the area. Pierce picked me up on Canal Street; he is built like a fireplug and has a double-bass voice. We drove to Bullet's, a working-class bar on A. P. Tureaud Avenue, in the Seventh Ward. There we met Mike Dauphin, a Vietnam veteran, who sat at our table for a long time talking about his childhood in Jim Crow New Orleans, riding in the back of the bus and going to segregated schools and working at American Can and U.S. Steel. When Katrina came, he was sheltered first at a hospice and then, with thousands of others, at the Convention Center, downtown, "where we had almost no water or food for five days." He could hardly wait to vote, and he was talking in the same terms as many older people around town: "I never dreamed in my lifetime that I would see a black man as President of the United States. I was a kid growing up under Jim Crow. We couldn't drink out of the same water faucet--but now it seems that America has changed."
In African-American neighborhoods, that was the nearly unanimous feeling--a refrain of relief, anticipatory celebration. Yet you also heard from many people a great wariness, a defense against white self-congratulation or the impression that somehow Obama's election would automatically transform the conditions of New Orleans and the country. In Treme, a neighborhood adjacent to the French Quarter and, arguably, the oldest black community in the country, I met Jerome Smith, a veteran of the Freedom Rides in Alabama and Mississippi. These days, Smith was running youth programs at Treme Community Center. On a sunny fall afternoon, we sat on the steps of a former funeral home on St. Claude Avenue that was now operating as the Backstreet Cultural Museum, an apartment-size collection of artifacts from the black bands that played Mardi Gras and second-line parades.
"Obama winning the Presidency breaks a historical rhythm, but it does not mean everything," Smith said. "His minister did not lie when he said that the controlling power in this country was rich white men. Rich white men were responsible for slavery. They are responsible for unbreakable levels of poverty for African-Americans. Look at this bailout today, which is all about us bailing out rich white men. And there are thousands of children from this city who have gone missing from New Orleans. Who will speak for them? Obama?
"Obama is the recipient of something, but he did not stand in the Senate after he was elected and say that there is a significant absence in this chamber, that he was the only African-American and this is wrong. He is no Martin Luther King, he is no Fannie Lou Hamer"--who helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, in 1964. "He is a man who can be accommodated by America, but he is not my hero, because a politician, by nature, has to surrender. Where the problems that afflict African-Americans are concerned, Obama can't go for broke. And the white people--good, decent white people--who vote for him just can't understand. They don't have to walk through the same misery as our children do."
Smith was angry but, as an activist contemplating a mainstream leader, not misguided. It was inevitable that euphoria would fade. And what would remain is a litany of disasters: cresting worldwide recession, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a rickety, unjust health-care system, melting polar ice caps, nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and South Asia--to say nothing of the crisis that comes from out of nowhere. In 2008, the new President was going to inherit a web of crises, almost too many to imagine.
Colin Powell said that, after a prolonged period in which American prestige abroad has dwindled, Obama would enjoy a "honeymoon period," especially abroad, which would give him an opportunity to "move forward on a number of foreign-policy fronts.
"That is also something that will perish or diminish over time, as he faces problems and crises," Powell continued. "If the excitement of the first black President is great, it'll diminish if he doesn't do something about the economy, or the economy worsens, or if we suddenly find ourselves in a crisis.... The next President will be challenged, and how the President responds to that challenge will be more important than what his race happens to be at that moment. But, for the initial period of an Obama Presidency, there will be an excitement, an electricity around the world that he can use."
As Election Day neared, the world of John McCain and his circle became increasingly bitter. The Obama campaign, which had forgone its promise to limit spending and instead refused public monies in order to accept unlimited donations, was outspending McCain by an estimated five hundred million dollars. With the economy continuing to shrivel and McCain seeming more and more unnerved by the crisis, moderates gravitated to Obama in swing states like Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana, and Colorado. Odds of an Obama victory were gaining fast. McCain could not help but see Obama as someone absurdly fortunate, a man possessed of such self-assurance, even hauteur, that he seemed to be "trying to get the country to prove something to him and not vice-versa," as Salter put it. "For Obama, if the country showed the good sense to elect him, it will have shown itself worthy of the promise it once had because I represent the fulfillment of that promise. The insinuation was that if you don't have the guts to change or become better, then you vote for John McCain. A vote for John McCain was not to show the proper courage; he's old, doesn't know how to use a computer."
Privately, McCain's aides knew that they had done themselves enormous injury by nominating Sarah Palin. She had proved herself so wildly undereducated in the affairs of the country and the world, so willing to say or do anything as long as she attracted attention, that it made McCain look weak and, worse, cynical. Like Rudy Giuliani, she disgraced herself by mocking Obama for working for the poor as a community organizer. It is unclear that another Vice-Presidential nominee would have helped McCain avoid losing--not in the midst of an economic free-fall with a weak, unpopular Republican President in the White House--but she did help him lose ingloriously. She behaved erratically, heedlessly, and McCain did nothing to stop her. By giving himself over to her rhetoric, by failing to put an end to the sort of smears she reveled in, McCain had forfeited some part of what he valued most in himself--his sense of honor.
Mark Salter and other McCain lieutenants felt that they had never been given a chance, that they were victims of a "meta-narrative" pushed by the press, especially by reporters old enough to have a memory of the civil-rights movement. In their frustrated view, these reporters attached themselves to the Obama campaign as an act of personal mission. "A lot of them, like me, never served in the military," Salter said. "Civil rights was a great struggle, and now they could all do their bit."
Salter felt that he and McCain's other principal aides had never been able to set aside their differences and get it together to present him as an equally compelling candidate, a man who had lost his way when he was young and then found it through public service and military sacrifice, someone who was so committed to his country and his fellow soldiers that he refused repeated offers from the North Vietnamese to be released before his comrades. "We could have done a better job for a guy who was good to us," Salter said.
For everyone involved in the campaign, it would forever be impossible to recapture the sense of what it was like to be in the midst of the prolonged battle. Salter's sense of injury, which reflected McCain's, was profound. "The truth is, all that will be remembered of the campaign is that America's original sin was finally expunged," Salter said. "That's all. In history, that's all. The real McCain will be lost to history. He's got years ahead of him, but he is lost to history. The narrative is the narrative, completely untrue and unfair, but he is the old guy who ran a derogatory campaign and can't remember how many houses he had."
Barack Obama won the election with fifty-three per cent of the popular vote to McCain's forty-six per cent. He won by more than nine and a half million votes and took three hundred and sixty-five electoral votes of a total five hundred and thirty-eight. Turnout was the highest since 1968. African-American turnout rose a full two per cent and was crucial to Obama in winning unlikely states like North Carolina and Virginia. Obama won every region of the country by double digits except the South, where McCain led by nine points. Nationally, Obama did not win the white vote--McCain won it fifty-five per cent to forty-three--but the country was becoming increasingly diverse and non-white. One of the breakthroughs of the election was to reinforce the demographic and psychological reality that the United States was, in the twenty-first century, a different place.
For weeks before the voting, commentators and voters wondered if Obama's poll numbers would collapse in the voting booth, if white voters would privately turn against him in significant numbers. In other words, they worried about the "Bradley effect," which holds that many white voters who tell pollsters that they would vote for a black candidate--like Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley--do otherwise when they are actually in the voting booth. This happened repeatedly in the nineteen-eighties and earlier, but the Obama campaign had taken heart from more recent campaigns, like Harold Ford's Senate race in Tennessee, where voters seemed unaffected by the old trend. It turned out, in fact, that many white voters, acting on economic issues, were completely prepared to turn to Obama. Most famously, in Fishtown, Pennsylvania, a depressed white suburb of Philadelphia, some openly racist voters told a pollster that they were undecided. Suddenly, there was talk of a "Fishtown effect" that would replace the Bradley effect. As David Bositis, an expert on racial voting patterns, put it, the Bradley effect was a force when "Santa Claus powered his sleigh with coal. It's no longer germane to American society." There was even talk of a "Palmer effect" or a "Huxtable effect"--a nod to the normalizing influence on whites of pop-culture African-Americans like President David Palmer, the black President on "24," or Bill Cosby's sitcom about an appealing African-American family that was, in its time, the most popular program on the air.
On Election Night, there were street celebrations all over the country: in Harlem and on the South Side, on college campuses and in town squares. There were celebrations in world capitals and around a makeshift video screen in Obama's ancestral village, in western Kenya.
The weather in Chicago was sunny and cool. Gold and russet leaves skittered with the wind along the streets in Hyde Park. While Obama waited out the results at his house on South Greenwood Avenue, and, later, at a hotel suite downtown, the whole city seemed alive to the coming party. By nightfall, along Michigan Avenue, huge crowds headed in one direction--toward Grant Park. The votes were not in, but there was no reason to believe that Obama could lose. People were singing, listening to street musicians, buying up stacks of Obama "chum": T-shirts, buttons, posters. Jay-Z and Nas and other hip-hop performers who had supported Obama and written lyrics about him played from speakers all along the avenue.
The crowd in Grant Park was vast--a hundred and twenty-five thousand people, all of them happy in the cool night. A blue stage was assembled with a long row of American flags set behind the speaker's lectern. All night, as the votes came in, I could think of only a few comparable days or nights in my life as a reporter: running along the streets of East Berlin, in 1989, as the first anti-Communist demonstrations broke out; not long after, sitting in the Magic Lantern Theater, in Prague, when Vaclav Havel and Alexander Dubcek toasted the resignation of the ruling Politburo and the end of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia; the late August evening along the Moscow River in 1991 when the K.G.B.-led coup collapsed and Mikhail Gorbachev was returned from captivity on the Black Sea. There were fireworks, too, that night in Moscow, singing, the waving of flags by people who had been wary of waving one. In Berlin, Prague, and Moscow, there was a sense of historical emancipation and grand promises, of a country being returned to its people. In Chicago, the history was not the same. A regime had not fallen. The color line had not been erased or even transcended, but a historical bridge had been crossed.
At one point, after Obama's victory had been announced, the crowd in Grant Park recited the Pledge of Allegiance. Derrick Z. Jackson, an African-American and a veteran reporter for the Boston Globe, wrote, "I have never heard such a multicultural throng recite the pledge with such determined enunciation, expelling it from the heart in a treble soaring to the skies and a bass drumming through the soil to vibrate my feet. The treble and bass met in my spine, where 'liberty and justice for all' evoked neither clank of chains nor cackle of cruelty, but a warm tickle of Jeffersonian slave-owning irony: Justice cannot sleep forever."
"The analogy I have for this is when Jackie Robinson broke into the majors," the journalist and civil-rights lawyer Roger Wilkins said. "From the time Branch Rickey signed him, I was just consumed. I couldn't think of anything else. What I discovered as I got older is what a real change Jackie made in people's attitudes--partly because he was a superb player, but also because he was an extraordinary man, who had the guts to hold his passion in. I had conversations for years with people who told me they had changed within. I think Barack Obama has the brains, the drive, the discipline, the toughness, and the cool to make a success of his Presidency, despite the mess he is being handed by the people who were there before. I've already seen white people responding to him during the campaign. My neighbor in our building is a widow born and raised on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, which was very racist. She had an Obama sticker on her door. So I asked her, 'Ann, why are you doing this, so deeply engaged.' She looked at me and said, 'Because I want to feel good about my country.' There are a lot of white people who haven't thought about this a lot or never had somebody teach them about race and here is this guy, Obama, and he doesn't have to make big racial speeches every day. All he has to do is be a good President. These are still hideous numbers about poverty and prisons and education in America--grotesque disparities. He can't wave a magic wand and make it all go away. These things are deep in our national D.N.A."
After the Electoral College count tipped past 270, the decisive number, the Obamas--Barack, Michelle, Malia, and Sasha--walked out on the Grant Park stage. What broke out is what can best be described as well-mannered pandemonium: crying, flag-waving, the embracing of friends and strangers. In his concession speech, McCain paid gracious tribute to the moment. The cameras captured Jesse Jackson standing alone, tears streaming down his face. The cynical interpretation was that they were crocodile tears, fakery, tears of regret that he wasn't the one on the stage. When I had the chance later to ask Jackson about the moment, he said that he had been thinking that night of Emmett Till, of Rosa Parks, of Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial, the march in Selma. "And in my own head I saw the funerals," he said. "I wish Dr. King and Malcolm could have been there for, like, just thirty seconds, just to see what they got killed about. That's when I began to well up and cried. Think about the martyrs: Fannie Lou Hamer, if she could have just been there for just a minute." He thought of a trip to Europe where people were telling him that Obama could never win. "It was all converged in my consciousness, both the journey to get there and the joy of the moment. I was in awe. I could see Dr. King putting on his shoes in Selma, getting ready to march, and Jim Farmer, and John Lewis--all of them. These were the people who made this day happen."
When the cheering finally quieted down, Obama gave a brisk and moving speech, one of thanks, unification, and promise. And, as he had so many times before, he called on a personal story to embody the sense of the moment, the emotions in the air. Earlier in the campaign it had been Ashley Baia, a young volunteer in South Carolina. Now it was Ann Nixon Cooper, who, at the age of a hundred and six, had just voted for him in Atlanta. Cooper was the grandmother of Lawrence Bobo, a sociologist at Harvard and one of the most prominent African-American academics in the country. Bobo's scholarly work centered on the complexities and changes in racial attitudes among whites and blacks. The Obama campaign had called Bobo's grandmother and said that he might mention her in the speech--campaign aides had seen her interviewed on CNN--but the family had no idea that the President-elect would take her life to show the passage from suffering to suffrage and then the moment of his ascension:
She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons--because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin. And tonight I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America--the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes, we can.
At a time when women's voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes, we can.
When there was despair in the Dust Bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs, and a new sense of common purpose. Yes, we can.
When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes, we can.
She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "We Shall Overcome." Yes, we can.
A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after a hundred and six years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change.
Yes, we can.
On a night of triumph, Obama's tone was not triumphal, it was not ringing; his tone was grave. Having cast himself in Selma twenty months earlier as one who stood on the "shoulders of giants," as the leader of the Joshua generation, he hardly had to mention race. It was the thing always present, the thing so rarely named. He had simultaneously celebrated identity and eased it into the background. Ann Nixon Cooper was an emblem not only of her race, but of her nation.
"Change has come to America," Obama declared, and, in a park best remembered until now as the place where, forty summers ago, police did outrageous battle with antiwar protesters, everyone knew that change had come, and that--how long? too long--it was about damned time.