The Black History of the White House

by Clarence Lusane

  A Compelling Strategy: States of All Colors

  Although Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama became rivals during the 2008 campaign and since, the latter arguably owes his electoral success to the former. As noted in Chapter 8, Jackson’s effort to make the Democratic Party more democratic after his 1984 campaign had created a critical rule change that would be a decisive element for Obama’s campaign 24 years later.

  Just as he was forced to choose a message that drew a clear distinction between himself and his rivals, Obama also needed a strategy that could beat the Clinton political juggernaut and all that the Republican Party would throw at him. For nearly twenty years, the Clintons had controlled much of the Democratic Party machinery. The conventional wisdom in 2007 was that Clinton, with overwhelming support from blacks and women, would win the nomination with relatively little difficulty. The primaries and caucuses were merely the rituals by which she would be anointed the candidate. As writers Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser point out, the Clinton camp was so confident of her eventual nomination that she never made a formal announcement of her entrance in the race or gave a clear reason why she was running.23

  Clinton opted to run a traditional strategy of campaigning in the primaries in the large states and paying scant attention to the small states and caucuses. Her campaign also felt there was little to gain by campaigning in states where the Democrats were likely or sure to lose in the November election. To some degree, Clinton’s approach was driven by limited resources, as the campaign ran into financial troubles at critical stages in the race and was forced to streamline. In an ordinary year against an ordinary candidate, it probably would have been a winning strategy.

  Obama evolved two-prong tactics: put energy and resources into winning the smaller and Republican Party-oriented states in the primaries and caucuses, and make a competitive showing in the larger states that were going to be difficult if not impossible for him to win. Since the advent of the modern system of primaries and caucuses as the main means by which the major parties select their candidates for the presidency, with the convention serving as a crowning more than anything else, strategies for winning have followed the Electoral College math. Serious Democratic candidates tend to focus their energies on a few swing states, giving token appearances in states the party is likely to win in the fall campaign and completely ignoring states they are likely to lose. Republicans follow a similar path. What this means is that much of the country is marginalized and the sense of political polarization deepens.

  Obama stated from the beginning that he wanted to run in all fifty states plus the District of Columbia. While his team’s fund-raising proficiency gave him the resources to carry out his pledge, it was the underlying philosophy that was emphasized publicly. Consistent with his message of one nation was the idea of taking his campaign to every community. While the Iowa caucus win was a decisive step in giving his campaign leverage and momentum, it was just the beginning. Obama won all the caucus states and accumulated a strategic reserve of delegates.

  While Hillary Clinton’s name was on the ballot in every state, her campaign clearly gave priority to the larger states that would figure significantly in the general election. By getting ahead of herself, she got behind. The problem she faced was that her strategy worked. She did win nearly all the big important Democratic and swing states. She won California, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, among others. And she lost many small states that Democrats were unlikely to win that November, which also turned out to be correct. Unfortunately, that strategy misread the mathematics and technical rules of first winning the Democratic nomination.

  In the 1980s, in a crucial rule change, the Democratic Party instituted proportional delegate distribution. With a threshold of 15 percent, candidates would receive delegates based on the percentage of the vote they won. If a candidate won 40 percent of the vote in a state, he or she would get roughly 40 percent of the delegates, even if they lost the state. While the media and the Clinton campaign focused on who “won” the big states, they initially paid little attention to the delegate accumulation numbers until Obama had built an insurmountable edge.

  In the general campaign, Obama’s strategy to some degree reverted to a traditional swing-state focus, but not totally. He had campaign offices across the country, and their activism, even in states where Obama could not win, benefited other Democrats who were on the ticket. Having those offices also forced the McCain campaign to play defense, to some degree. In the end, Obama won a number of states that Bush had carried in 2004, including Colorado, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia.

  Much was made of the fact that the map of states that voted for John McCain fit neatly over the map of Confederate states that attempted to secede from the United States in 1861. While the map shows the general racial voting patterns of the South, there is much it does not show. There is no question that the region was the least supportive of Obama, even among Democrats and independents. In nearly every Southern state covered by the Voting Rights Act, with the exception of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, Obama fared worse than or the same as John Kerry had with white voters. (See Table 1.)

  Table 1

  States covered by the VRA

  Percent of White

  Voters for Obama

  (2008) Percent of White

  Voters for Kerry

  (2004) Difference

  Alabama 10 19 -10

  Arkansas 30 36 -6

  Florida 42 42 0

  Georgia 23 23 0

  Louisiana 14 24 -10

  Mississippi 11 14 -3

  North Carolina 35 27 +8

  South Carolina 26 22 +4

  Tennessee 34 34 0

  Texas 26 25 +1

  Virginia 39 32 +7

  However, as researcher Chris Kromm notes, when broken down by age, the white voting pattern was inconsistent and broke stereotypes. Older white voters in the region, who have been voting Republican for generations, strongly supported McCain. Yet, Kromm points out, “In six Southern states, 40% of whites under the age of thirty voted for Obama.”24 In fact, only in South Carolina and Georgia did white voters under thirty vote in a lower percentage than the overall white vote. (See Table 2.) In other words, the trend among young white voters in the region is more liberal, in some instances significantly so, than the overall election result indicates.

  Table 2

  Southern States with the Biggest White Voter Generation Gap for Obama

  State Percent of White

  Vote Under 30 for

  Obama Percent of Overall

  White Vote for

  Obama White Voter

  “Generation Gap”

  North Carolina 56 35 +21

  Tennessee 45 34 +11

  Mississippi 18 11 +7

  Kentucky 42 35 +6

  West Virginia 45 41 +4

  Arkansas 34 30 +4

  Texas 30 26 +4

  Virginia 42 39 +3

  Louisiana 17 14 +3

  Alabama 13 10 +3

  Florida 44 42 +2

  South Carolina 24 26 –2

  Georgia 20 23 –3

  Upon examination, the voting patterns were much more complicated than is revealed by a simple framework of blue and red states. In many ways, the national political divide is not so much between red states and blue states but between red states and blue cities. While Republicans are strong in a number of Southern and Western states where there are few African Americans, and depending upon the state, few other racial or ethnic minorities, the nation’s urban areas swing Democratic. In virtually every state, the vote was relatively close. Only a few states had a wide gap.

  Although Obama won 95 percent of the black vote, 43 percent of the white vote, and 67 percent of the Latino vote, his overall voting constituency was very diverse, especially when compared to McCain’s. Broken down by race, 61 percent of Obama’s voters were white, 23 percent were black, and 11 percent were Latino. McCain’s voting bloc was about 90 percent
white, 4 percent black, and 6 percent Latino. (See Table 3.)

  Table 3

  2008 Vote by Race

  Racial Group % Voting for

  Obama % Voting for

  McCain Other

  Asian 62 35 3

  Black 95 4 1

  Latino 67 31 2

  White 43 55 2

  Other 66 31 3

  A Compelling Narrative

  In addition to his brilliant campaign strategy and a political message that resonated with an America in crisis, Obama had a unique personal story that helped galvanize millions of citizens to volunteer. A perfect storm of factors coalesced in Obama’s favor. The country wanted a change in direction and Obama’s personal narrative supported his message and resonated with voters. The incumbent’s image as a white, spoiled, inarticulate, ne’er-do-well son of a wealthy U.S. president could not have been further from that of the mixed-raced son of a single mother. Clinton and McCain’s political longevity, ultimately viewed in a negative light, and their sense of entitlement to the position were also rejected by voters.

  Obama’s life story is well known due to his best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, and the stories he told during the campaign25 about his childhood as the son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya. Mainstream America viewed Obama’s childhood spent in Hawaii and Indonesia as unique, exotic and perhaps, to some, threatening. After Barack Obama Sr. abandoned the family, his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, remarried and moved with her son to Indonesia for four years. Critics have seized on his time in Indonesia to make the false assertions that he converted to Islam, attended a fundamentalist Wahhabi Muslim school, and took his Senate oath by swearing on a Koran. The website for Insight magazine posted a piece asking, “Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a Madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage?”26 The article was immediately picked up and spread by Fox News, then debunked as baseless by CNN, the Washington Post, and other news sources.27

  He later returned to the United States to live with his grandparents in Hawaii, a state as culturally remote to most Americans as Alaska. His mother was a social anthropologist and his father an economist, so education was highly stressed for both Barack and his sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, who would later earn a Ph.D. in international comparative education. Barack went to Columbia University to finish his undergraduate degree, then went on to Harvard Law School, where he was elected over eighteen others to become the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. As the New York Times reported it:

  The Harvard Law Review, generally considered the most prestigious in the country, elected the first black president in its 104-year history today. The job is considered the highest student position at Harvard Law School.

  The new president of the Review is Barack Obama, a 28-year-old graduate of Columbia University who spent four years heading a community development program for poor blacks on Chicago’s South Side before enrolling in law school. . . .

  “The fact that I’ve been elected shows a lot of progress,” Mr. Obama said today in an interview. “It’s encouraging.

  “But it’s important that stories like mine aren’t used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks. You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don’t get a chance,” he said, alluding to poverty or growing up in a drug environment.28

  Doors were opening for Obama in all directions, and the path he chose to take led to electoral politics. Eager to make a difference in public policy, in 1996 he ran for and won a seat in the Illinois State Senate. When the opportunity presented itself in 2004, he ran for a U.S. Senate seat for Illinois and, due to the misfortunes of his strongest Democratic and Republican challengers, easily defeated the fanatical, hapless Maryland transplant Alan Keyes.

  Obama’s storybook life was well exposed by the time he actually joined the race for the presidency. Some observers speculated that perhaps one factor that made Obama attractive to whites was that he did not have the lineage of slavery, often perceived as a defining characteristic of being black in America. In fact, research has documented that while some of his mother’s ancestors fought for the Union during the Civil War, others were enslavers. According to research by William Addams Reitwiesner and the Baltimore Sun, “One of Obama’s great-great-great-great-grandfathers, George Washington Overall, owned two slaves who were recorded in the 1850 census in Nelson County, Ky. . . . [and] one of Obama’s great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, Mary Duvall, also owned two slaves” according to that same 1850 census.29 Overall enslaved a fifteen-year-old black girl and a twenty-five-year-old black man; and Duvall enslaved a sixty-year-old black man and a fifty-eight-year-old black woman.

  Obama’s nontraditional black history led some in the black community to raise the question of whether he was “black enough.”30 Stanley Crouch, in a Daily News article titled “What Obama Isn’t: Black Like Me,” wrote: “So when black Americans refer to Obama as ‘one of us,’ I do not know what they are talking about. . . . Obama makes it clear that, while he has experienced some light versions of typical racial stereotypes, he cannot claim those problems as his own—nor has he lived the life of a black American.”31 This view is echoed by writer Debra Dickerson in an article titled, “Colorblind: Barack Obama would be the great black hope in the next presidential race—if he were actually black.” She states bluntly that “Obama isn’t black,” arguing that “‘Black,’ in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves.”32

  Despite the vigorous debate in some quarters, the issue was settled at the polls when he won well over 90 percent of the black vote in most primary and caucus contests, and over 95 percent in the general election.

  There was also an effort to paint Obama as “too black” on the part of conservatives who equated his liberal voting record with his race. However, the same factors that led some to question Obama’s blackness also made it difficult to place him in the same box as traditional civil rights leaders or contemporary black elected officials.

  Perhaps Pollster Cornell Belcher best articulated the sentiment of Obama’s white voters. He stated, “It would be difficult for an African-American to be elected president in this country. However, it is not difficult for an extraordinary individual who happens to be African-American to be elected president.”33 (Emphasis in original.)

  Race and the Race for the White House

  I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy—particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.—Barack Obama

  Although he openly identifies with being black34 and has never shied away from addressing racial concerns—politically, Obama shrewdly played them down while campaigning. His core policy focus was on the economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (issues on which Clinton and McCain were highly vulnerable), health care, and a new energy policy. But the issue of race would not go away.

  Prior to winning the White House, Obama constructed a black and multiracial identity forged through the prism of his travels and travails through Hawaii, Indonesia, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Boston, the imaginings passed on from his black immigrant Kenyan father, and the love and ambition given by his white Kansan mother.35 In Dreams from My Father, he discusses his long journey of awareness of the consequences of both social and personal racialization. The book recounts, often painfully, his realization of his complex personal history, and matrix of multiple racial and national identities it created, and the saga of how he comes to clearly identify himself as a black man:

  Yes, I’d seen weakness in other men—Gramps and his disappointments, Lolo and his compromise. But these men had become object lessons for me, men I might love but never emulate, white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black
man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, Du Bois and Mandela.36

  As he notes, the book had a cathartic purpose that had to be expressed before he could actually evolve to the next stage in his life, a public career. Race and a critique of racism have always been salient to the public and personal Obama. How could they not be?

  More often than not, however, when discussing race Obama has sought to present a more united and conciliatory tone in his political persona. In his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention, which first brought him into the national spotlight for most Americans and set him on the path to the White House, other than his very presence, race is secondary to his chief objective: to quilt a broad picture and projection of an America with minimum racial division. His only references in the speech to race are in his allusion to the interracial marriage of his parents, and his call for national unity, i.e., “There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.”37 At that point, Obama was running for the U.S. Senate in Illinois.

  As a politician in Illinois and in the U.S. Senate, when Obama did address race, he tended to use a broad frame that embraced a harsh rebuke of historical U.S. structural and institutional racism, praise for the black struggle for freedom—often with admonishments implying a behaviorist critique of the black community—and a call to acknowledge the significant progress that has been made in race relations. He then would add that there is still work to be done to end discrimination. Thus in one politically brilliant (though not necessarily theoretically coherent) stroke he managed to incorporate mainstream liberal, conservative, and centrist critiques of racism in the United States. During the 2008 campaign, he strategically avoided directly discussing race until the Reverend Jeremiah Wright controversy forced the issue onto the table.

  The controversy began when it was first publicized by ABC News on March 13, 2008, that Obama’s longtime minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ, had made a number of inflammatory statements in some of his sermons.38 Criticisms of Wright’s sermons, however, had been circulating on right-wing websites for months, as soon as it became clear that Obama was a serious candidate, according to writers Adia Wingfield and Joe Feagin.39 Once the sermons, or rather the most incendiary snippets of them, were aired, both Democratic and Republican opponents would use them to attack Obama. Echoing Malcolm X’s response to the assassination of President Kennedy,40 in a sermon following the September 11, 2001 attacks, Wright said “America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” and in 2003, he stated in another address from the pulpit, “No, no, no. Not God bless America; God damn America!”41