Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Speaking with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, Barack mentioned his private conversation with Wright and his apology to Coburn, “who I consider a close friend.” Later that day, speaking to the Detroit NAACP, Wright contended that African American and European American children learn differently, with the former having a “right-brained, subject-oriented” learning style, and the latter “a left-brained, cognitive object-oriented learning style.” Then, the next morning, Wright, his wife, and his eldest daughter joined a trio of black journalists for an appearance at the National Press Club.

  “This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright, it is an attack on the black church,” Wright asserted. “Black preaching is different from European and European American preaching. It is not deficient. It is just different. It is not bombastic. It is not controversial. It’s different.” Wright reiterated his notion that “black learning styles are different from European and European American learning styles,” but far more usefully mentioned that Trinity has “sent thirty-five men and women through accredited seminaries.” When the session turned to Q&A, Wright brushed aside some inquiries. “You haven’t heard the whole sermon? That nullifies the question.” He noted, “I served six years in the military. Does that make me patriotic?” Returning to his main point, Wright insisted that “this is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright. It has nothing to do with Senator Obama. This is an attack on the black church.” He recklessly declared that Louis Farrakhan “is one of the most important voices in the twentieth and twenty-first century,” adding that “I said to Barack Obama last year, ‘If you get elected, November the 5th I’m coming after you, because you’ll be representing a government whose policies grind under people.” Then Wright made reference to two books, Emerging Viruses, by Leonard Horowitz, whom serious scholars viewed as an “AIDS conspiracy theorist,” and Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid, a credible, mainstream work of history detailing how government programs had victimized black patients.

  By nightfall, excerpts of Wright’s comments flooded cable news. In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Barack knew he would have to denounce Wright far more bluntly than before if his candidacy was to survive. “The person that I saw yesterday was not the person I met twenty years ago,” Barack told a Winston-Salem press conference on Tuesday. Still smarting from Wright’s characterization of his Philadelphia speech, Barack said “he doesn’t know me very well,” and, given his Monday remarks, “I may not know him as well as I thought, either.” Wright “has done enormous good in the church. He has built a wonderful congregation. The people of Trinity are wonderful people, and what attracted me has always been their ministries’ reach beyond the church walls.” But Wright’s embrace of AIDS conspiracies and Louis Farrakhan are “ridiculous propositions” which “should be denounced. And that’s what I’m doing very clearly and unequivocally here today. . . . When I say that I find these comments appalling, I mean it. It contradicts everything that I am about and who I am.”

  Replying to a question, Barack explained that “upon watching it, what became clear to me was that it was more than just defending himself. What became clear to me was that he was presenting a worldview that contradicts who I am and what I stand for. And what I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing.” Furthermore, “the insensitivity and the outrageousness of his statements and his performance in the question and answer period yesterday, I think, shocked me. . . . In some ways what Reverend Wright said yesterday directly contradicts everything that I’ve done during my life.” Uttering “a bunch of rants that aren’t grounded in truth” was “a show of disrespect to me,” and given how Wright “caricaturized himself . . . that made me angry, but also made me saddened.”17

  The forcefulness of Barack’s statements allayed the burgeoning controversy. The Washington Post thought “the whole sorry episode raises legitimate questions about his judgment,” but the New York Times saluted Barack’s “powerful, unambiguous denunciation” as “the most forthright repudiation of an out-of-control supporter that we can remember.” Barack and his aides were deeply fearful of the impact Wright’s behavior would have in the decisive Indiana and North Carolina primaries on May 6, and on NBC’s Meet the Press Barack again addressed the issue. By employing “divisive, hateful language,” Wright demonstrated “that he did not share my fundamental belief and my fundamental values in terms of bringing the country together and moving forward.” Barack confessed, “I feel a great loyalty to that church,” yet with Wright he insisted that “I never sought his counsel when it came to politics. . . . My commitments are to the values of that church, my commitment is to Christ, it’s not to Reverend Wright.” To Newsweek, Barack even claimed that “I cannot recall a time where he and I sat down and talked about theology or we had long discussions about my faith.”

  The night before Indiana and North Carolina voted, Barack was as despondent as Valerie Jarrett had ever seen him. “How could someone I knew, sometime I trusted, do this to me?” Barack vented, fearing that Wright might have sunk his candidacy. When David Axelrod reported that polling showed Barack losing Indiana and neck-and-neck in North Carolina, Barack responded acerbically. “Get Axelrod out of here. He’s a downer.” But twenty-four hours later, the actual vote totals were vastly better: Barack won North Carolina by 15 points, and Hillary Clinton’s margin over him in Indiana was just a single point. The overall delegate race remained tight, but now it looked virtually certain that Barack could narrowly clinch the Democratic nomination in four weeks’ time, following the last six small-state primaries.

  In private, Jeremiah Wright reassured old friend Tim Black, “I support Barack one hundred percent. I believe in his vision, and I believe that he is the best qualified candidate to offer us the hope of going in a different direction as a country.” Across black Chicago, scores of people who knew both men were pained beyond words, for as one of the city’s wisest African American voices emphatically emphasized, “Jeremiah Wright was the black male father figure for Barack,” someone whose long-term influence upon Barack should not be underestimated. Then, on the last Sunday in May, Father Mike Pfleger mocked Hillary Clinton while guest-preaching at Trinity, and Barack’s campaign was forced to disassociate him from those remarks too. Two days later, Barack announced that “with some sadness,” he and Michelle were withdrawing as members of Trinity. “This was one I didn’t see coming,” Barack told reporters.18

  On June 3, as expected, delegates won in the two final Democratic primaries, in Montana and South Dakota, allowed Barack to clinch the Democratic nomination. The final lines of Barack’s victory speech were remarkable:

  I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment—this was the time—when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals

  Very few U.S. newspapers took note of those words, but Barack also took the time to call Madelyn Dunham in Honolulu. “She just said she was really proud,” Barack told ABC’s Charles Gibson the next morning. “She’s going blind, so to hear in her voice what this meant to her, that was a pretty powerful moment.” Madelyn “is a very steady person,” Barack told another interviewer. “She never gets too high, and never gets too low. And I think a lot of my temperament comes from her.” In a speech discussing how he had grown up fatherless, Barack said, “I resolved many years ago that it was my obligation to break the cycle—that if I could be anything in life, I would be a good father to my children.”

  In a mid-June videotaped message, Barack announced that his campaign would reject public financing, which “was set up to reduce the infl
uence of private donations in the political process,” a front-page New York Times story noted. “His decision to break an earlier pledge to take public money will quite likely transform the landscape of presidential campaigns, injecting hundreds of millions of dollars into the race and raising doubts about the future of public financing for national races.” The Times added that “the decision means that Mr. Obama will have to spend considerably more time raising money . . . at the expense of spending time meeting voters.” Times columnist David Brooks eviscerated Barack, writing that “Obama didn’t just sell out . . . the primary cause of his professional life” to win “a tiny political advantage” over Republican John McCain, but did so in “a video so risibly insincere that somewhere down in the shadow world” the notorious late Republican hatchet man “Lee Atwater is gaping and applauding.”19

  In early July, Barack told a religious magazine that “we can prohibit late-term abortions” so long as “there is a strict, well-defined exception for the health of the mother. Now, I don’t think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term.” Citing both that and the campaign finance U-turn, Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass reminded readers that “Obama is a Chicago politician” who “has flip-flopped again and again.” Progressive Chicago author Paul Street stressed how in Springfield, “Obama was more interested in having his name associated with resume-padding legislative victories than with attaining ‘progressive’ victories.”

  When a pair of interviewers from a women’s magazine asked Barack about Michelle earning more than him thanks to her high-paying U of C Medical Center job, Barack replied that “that wasn’t much of an issue, because the truth is, for eleven out of the thirteen years we were married, I was making substantially more than her, and during the two years that I wasn’t, I was running for the United States Senate, which had its own gratifications. So it wasn’t as if I felt inadequate. . . . I didn’t feel threatened by that at all,” Barack insisted.

  The weeks leading up to the Democratic National Convention in Denver at the end of August featured scores of news features examining various aspects of Barack’s life, but journalists found Barack’s campaign far from helpful. A New York Times reporter complained that “they attacked me like I’m a political opponent” when one of his stories drew the campaign’s ire, and The New Republic noted that communications director Robert Gibbs “has built a particularly large reservoir of ill will” among journalists. “Reporters who have covered Obama’s biography or his problems with certain voter blocs have been challenged the most aggressively,” Gabriel Sherman wrote. “‘They’re terrified of people poking around Obama’s life,’ one reporter says. ‘The whole Obama narrative is built around this narrative that Obama and David Axelrod built, and, like all stories, it’s not entirely true. So they have to be protective of the crown jewels.’”20

  As Barack’s nomination drew near, more and more journalists attempted to gauge his character. New York magazine noted that thanks to Barack’s “calm, collected nature . . . he has been able to completely defang the stereotype of the angry black male.” In The New Republic, John B. Judis, who had interviewed Barack’s community organizing mentors, warned that Obama is “a politician of vision, not interests” and has “fashioned a political identity in near-total opposition to the core principles of his one-time profession.” Former U of C Law School colleague Cass Sunstein pronounced Barack “a minimalist” whose “pragmatism is heavily empirical.” In one of the most perceptive readings ever of Dreams, the well-known writer David Samuels pinpointed Barack’s “distanced and writerly view of a self as something that is summoned through a creative act of will.” Noting “the painful process of self-formation” that Barack went through, Samuels highlighted “Obama’s uncharitable treatment of his white family” and “his distaste for his mother” while pointing out the “many structural parallels” that Dreams shared with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Barack claimed to Time that as an undergraduate, “I was reading Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek,” famous conservative economists, and Barack told the Tribune that “I had to scratch and claw my way to the point I am now, and I think I’ve done so without cutting corners or compromising my integrity.”21

  On August 23, Barack announced his selection of Senate Foreign Relations Committee colleague Joe Biden as his vice presidential running mate, and five days later Barack accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for president of the United States. As his campaign against the Republican ticket of Senator John McCain and Alaska governor Sarah Palin got under way, Barack spoke haltingly with ABC’s Diane Sawyer about the absence of his father from his life. What would Barack ask him? Sawyer queried. “I’d like to ask him what he felt about his wives. There was no sense of real commitment there. Not just me, but many of his subsequent wives and their children. And I’d like to know what it was that led him to miss that aspect of what a marriage should be about.”

  With grandmother Madelyn Dunham dying of cancer and requiring surgery for a broken hip, Barack broke off from campaigning on October 23 to make the long flight to Honolulu to see her in the same apartment where he had grown up. “I’m still not sure whether she makes it to Election Day,” Barack told ABC’s Good Morning America. “I wanted to make sure . . . that I had a chance to sit down with her and talk to her. She’s still alert and she’s still got all her faculties, and I want to make sure that I don’t miss that opportunity right now,” as he had thirteen years earlier with his mother.

  Ten days later, early on Monday morning, November 3, Madelyn died in her apartment at age eighty-six, with Maya Soetoro-Ng by her bedside. Maya called Barack with the news, and at a campaign rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, Barack spoke somberly about her role in his life. Madelyn’s body was cremated, and the next evening, Maya watched the election returns with Madelyn’s urn by her side. At 11:00 P.M. the networks declared Barack the next president of the United States, and the final tally showed him defeating John McCain by almost 10 million votes, 53 to 46 percent. Barack carried twenty-eight of the fifty states, with his Electoral College margin over McCain a whopping 365 to 173.22

  In New York, former Business International Corporation vice president Lou Celi spoke for everyone who had known Barack prior to 1985. “There was no clue. . . . You would never think in a million years that this was going to be the president of the United States.” In Chicago, Emil Jones Jr. thought back to how Alice Palmer’s supporters had filed such inept petition signatures in December 1995. “That was a fatal mistake which would change the course of history.” Across Illinois, multiple Democrats thought about someone who was absent from election night celebrations. “Barack Obama is not where he is today without Dan Shomon, and I don’t think anyone can or will dispute that.” Another Obama supporter put it more pungently. “If it wasn’t for Dan Shomon, Barack Obama wouldn’t be shit.” In San Francisco, DNC speechwriting coordinator Vicky Rideout recalled July 27, 2004: “if it weren’t for that moment, he wouldn’t be president.”

  In Chicago, David Plouffe and David Axelrod knew that January 3, 2008, had been crucial. If Clinton “had been able to prevent us from winning Iowa, she would have been the nominee,” Plouffe explained. The Iowa victory had been essential in a second way too: at the campaign’s outset, “the biggest race problem we had to start was not with the white voters,” Axelrod felt, “but with African American voters” who had “a deep sense of skepticism” that a black candidate could win. Among black observers, there was little disagreement about why Barack had won the support of 43 percent of white voters. Barack’s “racial idealism” touched “a deep longing . . . on the part of whites to escape the stigma of racism,” and many whites “literally longed for ways to disprove the stigma” by supporting Barack. “Voting for Obama was like reparations on the cheap,” African American law professor Richard Thompson Ford cogently explain
ed. Yet even conservative commentator Shelby Steele predicted that “the profound disparity between black and white Americans . . . will persist even under the glow of an Obama presidency.”

  Barack immediately was faced with a major economic crisis he would be inheriting from George W. Bush, as well as the need to make scores of crucial personnel decisions. Appearing on CBS’s 60 Minutes alongside Michelle, Barack pledged, “I intend to close Guantánamo, and I will follow through on that”; in a subsequent interview, Barack also emphasized “my broad commitment: no torture.” On December 20, the Obama family flew to Honolulu for their annual holiday getaway, and three days later, following a memorial service, Barack and Maya traveled to Lanai Lookout to scatter Madelyn Dunham’s ashes into the Pacific at the same spot where they had scattered Ann’s in 1995.23