Everyone sensed that Clinton had outcampaigned Obama in the final days of Ohio and Texas and that the style of their campaign needed to change. “She was campaigning close to the ground in a very visceral way,” Axelrod said. “We were doing these iconic rallies which [gave a] sense of this cult-like following, but didn’t give people the sense of closeness.” Obama wanted smaller events where there was no separation between candidate and voters. He wanted to get back to being authentic, back to the message that had brought him into the race.
What made the day more difficult was the knowledge that Pennsylvania would likely be a repeat of Ohio. The Pennsylvania primary was then seven weeks away, seven weeks in which Obama would face repeated questions about why he couldn’t win the big states, why he was struggling with white working-class voters, why this, why that. They would go through seven weeks and Clinton almost certainly would win another primary. The delegate math still favored him; she had few options and minimal hopes. The battle for the nomination might effectively be decided, but it was far from over. Obama’s failures in Ohio and Texas were costly.
As he was leaving the meeting, Obama paused and looked back at his team. “Look, I’m not yelling at you guys,” he said. He started to leave again and then stopped one more time. “Although after blowing through twenty million dollars in the last couple of weeks I could yell at you. But I’m not yelling at you.” He laughed and left the room. The primary season was just two months old. Clinton’s comeback meant three more hard months ahead.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Politics in Black and White
“God damn America!”
—The Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr.
The losses in Ohio and Texas plunged Obama into two of his worst months. Almost overnight, the coverage changed. Before, he was the gifted, transformational politician leading a movement for change. For the next eight weeks, he was a candidate surrounded by question marks. He made mistakes, and events also moved against him.
Ten days after Ohio and Texas, the most serious threat to his candidacy appeared in the grainy videos of his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, thundering, “God damn America!” from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ. The preacher in the videos was not the benign and fatherly figure Obama had described as his spiritual adviser and inspiration for the title of his second best-selling book, The Audacity of Hope. This pastor was divisive and offensive, filled with resentment toward white America and the national government Obama was seeking to lead.
Days after the 9/11 attacks, Wright had been captured on video shouting, “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. 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.” Then, pirouetting before the congregation, he roared, “America’s chickens—are coming home—to roost!”
Race, the topic Obama had sought to transcend, now dominated the discussion about him. He wanted to be a post-racial candidate, not an extension of the civil rights generation, and suddenly he found himself at the center of a controversy that highlighted the gulf that still divided blacks and whites. “What you had was a moment where all the suspicions and misunderstandings that are embedded in our racial history were suddenly laid bare,” he said during one of our interviews. He knew there was no way to dodge this crisis. “If we had not handled the Reverend Wright episode properly,” he said, “I think we could have lost.”
ABC News brought Jeremiah Wright to the public’s attention after the network obtained videotapes of Wright’s sermons that were sold at his church. During nearly four decades as senior pastor, Wright had built the church into a powerhouse of religious and social activity on Chicago’s South Side and Wright had a reputation as one of the nation’s leading African-American ministers. That he became an antagonist was no surprise to the Obama campaign. On the eve of announcing his presidential candidacy in February 2007, Obama had withdrawn his invitation for Wright to deliver the invocation. At that time, Rolling Stone was about to publish an article quoting Wright as saying America believed in “white supremacy and black inferiority,” as well as using a vulgarity from the pulpit. Obama recalled for us his conversation with Wright then: “I said to him, ‘You know what, you will end up being a center of attention, and I think potentially tagged unfairly, and we don’t want a huge distraction.’” Although Wright’s controversial sermons were readily available, no one on Obama’s staff ordered up a thorough search of their content. “We were caught by surprise by those videos,” Obama admitted to us. “It was just bad research on our part.”
Obama had joined the church almost twenty years earlier as he was attempting to put down roots in his newly adopted home of Chicago. Wright married Barack and Michelle and baptized their daughters. While Obama considered Wright a provocative and fiery preacher, he claimed never to have seen or heard the most incendiary of his sermons. “Reverend Wright has a lot of fine qualities,” Obama told us. “He’s a great preacher . . . but Reverend Wright remained rooted in the rhetoric of the sixties. . . . What he was saying was not considered in any way exceptional in the African-American community for his generation. He never updated or refreshed that worldview to accommodate the changes that were taking place in America. And what you were seeing in Reverend Wright and those statements were not only offensive to everybody in many ways, but it also showed an anger and bitterness . . . that may be more acceptable in some circles in the African-American community but is never acceptable in mainstream America. And so you had that sudden, really volatile potential clash of visions.”
The Wright story exploded on Friday, March 14. Obama returned to Chicago that afternoon already scheduled for interviews with the two Chicago papers about the controversy over his relationship with the corrupt Chicago developer Tony Rezko. But the Wright controversy demanded his immediate reaction. Obama’s religious outreach adviser, Josh DuBois, had prepared a statement in Obama’s name. After reading it, Obama decided to draft his own—eight paragraphs in which he described Wright’s remarks as “inflammatory and appalling.” Obama also decided he wanted to go on television that night. Some advisers questioned whether an on-camera interview was advisable. Wouldn’t a strong statement suffice? No, Obama said. People are looking at Reverend Wright. They need to see me too. Valerie Jarrett remembered him saying, “I want them to look at me and I want them to hear and feel me. . . . It’s not enough to just do a statement.” That night on MSNBC, Obama condemned Wright’s words but stepped gingerly around the man himself. “I have known him seventeen years,” Obama said. “He helped bring me to Jesus and helped bring me to church. He’s like an uncle who talked to me, not about political things and social views, but faith and God and family.”
Obama’s last order to his staff was to schedule a major speech on race as quickly as possible. As far back as Iowa, Obama had talked to his advisers about giving such a speech, but the right moment never came. Now was the time. “I want to deal with this squarely,” he told his advisers. “I want to talk about this in a larger context. It’s a huge thing that we have to confront.”
Because Pennsylvania was his next primary, the speech was set for Philadelphia. Jon Favreau was told to draft something. Favreau balked. This is too personal a speech, he said. Before he started to write, he needed to hear from Obama, but Obama was campaigning. Not until 10:30 on Saturday night did they finally speak. Obama seemed resigned. Given his relationship with Wright and the church, he told Favreau, this would certainly be tough for him personally—that’s a price of running for president, he added. For the next forty-five minutes, as Favreau typed into his computer, Obama dictated what he wanted to say—stream-of-consciousness thoughts about the themes of the speech and lawyerly precision about its structure.
While Obama filmed new campaign commercials on Sunday, Favreau worked on the draft, fini
shing it early that evening and sending it to Obama. At home in Hyde Park, Obama began transforming the draft of what would be the most important speech of his campaign into his own words. Jarrett spoke to him around 11 p.m. “This is really complicated,” he told her. The speech had been in his head for a long time; finding the right words still escaped him. Good luck, she said. “He had to do it himself. Every word had to be his word. The most important thing was that people knew he meant what he said. And the only way they were going to know what he means to say is if they were his words.”
Obama worked far into the night, spent Monday campaigning, and then hunkered down in his hotel in Philadelphia to finish his draft. He e-mailed it to his advisers at 2 a.m. the morning of the speech.
“I think it’s good,” Obama told friends that morning. They had come to Philadelphia to offer support. That was Michelle’s idea. She was there, as were Jarrett, Marty Nesbitt and Eric Holder. Jarrett’s nerves were raw after a weekend of watching the video of Wright. “We all appreciated the painful irony of a person with whom he had had a relationship being responsible for potentially derailing his campaign,” Jarrett said. Obama talked basketball as he waited to go onstage.
His text was the Constitution, his theme “A More Perfect Union.” His most urgent goal was to explain his relationship to a minister whose words were so at odds with the tone and message of his own campaign. But he also wanted to speak frankly about the grievances and resentments that continued to divide black and white America.
Obama said Wright had expressed a “profoundly distorted view of this country—a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America.” While condemning Wright’s words, Obama again declined to abandon his pastor. “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community,” he said. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.” A grandmother, he added, who more than once uttered racial stereotypes “that made me cringe.”
The rest of his speech set the controversy in a broader context, one that reflected “the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through—a part of our union that we have yet to perfect.” He spoke of anger in the black community toward white Americans, resentment in white America toward black Americans, and the need for each side to understand the other. “This union may never be perfect,” he said. “But generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.”
There were tears among his friends as he finished. Holder told everyone he wished his father had lived to see the moment. “I said what I wanted to say,” Obama told his friends. “Let’s see whether they understood what I was trying to say.” Later, he told us, “I thought it was very important at that point for me to help translate the experiences both of Reverend Wright but also how the ordinary white American might feel in hearing Reverend Wright and how both sets of experiences were an outgrowth of our history and had to be acknowledged and dealt with instead of just papered over or reduced to a caricature. And I think that the speech in Philadelphia succeeded in doing that.” His speech, he told us, “was one of my prouder moments of the campaign.”
The question remained how it would be received. Axelrod told us a few minutes after the speech, “We were going to have this issue sometime. It might as well be now.”
On March 21, Bill Richardson endorsed Obama at a critical time, helping to show that Reverend Wright had not frightened away high-profile Democrats. Given Richardson’s ties to the Clintons—he served as United Nations ambassador and secretary of energy in the Clinton administration—the decision to back Obama was seen as a rejection of Hillary that came despite intensive efforts by both Clintons to win Richardson’s support. Both Bill and Hillary had made repeated calls to him asking for his support. Former administration officials also pressured him, saying he owed the Clintons. “That’s uncalled for,” he said he told one caller. “I don’t owe them anything. I served well. In fact I was always very loyal to President Clinton.”
In a highly public moment of courtship, Bill Clinton had come to Santa Fe to watch the Super Bowl with Richardson. Clinton was still fuming over the way he had been treated during South Carolina. “We talked about the campaign,” Richardson said. “He did feel the press had given him a bad rap: ‘How can they call me a racist? Look what I did with African-Americans and Hispanics. The press is really after me and they’re giving Obama a free ride.’” After the game, Richardson spoke to Hillary by phone. “She said, ‘Bill, we need you, I need you to endorse me before Texas. Please consider. I hear you two ate everything at the Super Bowl. . . . I hear you smoked those terrible cigars of yours.’ I said, ‘Well, Senator, we’ll be in touch.’”
Richardson was drawn to Obama, whose calls, he said, were always gracious. “This is Barack. Obama,” he would say, with a short pause between his first and last names. He called Richardson regularly. As Richardson said, they were “gentle, elegant calls asking for an endorsement. ‘Hey man, we can make history, let’s make some history together, you, me, and Teddy.’” Richardson was also struck by Obama’s casual elegance. One day, when they were together on Obama’s bus, someone brought out some fruit. “Obama says, ‘Where’s the silverware?’” Richardson recalled. “So they bring in the silverware. He gets a little plate out and he starts like cutting the orange and then takes it and offers it to me. And I thought to myself, just grab the goddamn orange.”
When Richardson finally decided to back Obama, his wife, Barbara, told him, “I’m behind you, but there’s going to be fury on the other side.” Before going public, he called Hillary. “I said, ‘Senator, I just wanted you to know that tomorrow I’m going to endorse Senator Obama and it was a real tough decision for me,’” he told us. “And Hillary said, ‘Bill, why, why?’ And I said I think there’s something special about this guy, something good. And I’ve gotten to know him and I think he’s somebody that comes once in a generation. I really feel that. And I think you’ve run a great campaign. I love you both.” He said Hillary responded, “But Bill, he can’t win. He can’t win. He can’t win.” She kept repeating that, Richardson said, and told him he was making a big mistake. “I could feel sort of the iciness on the other side,” he said.
His call to Bill Clinton was not returned. James Carville publicly branded Richardson a traitor for endorsing Obama.
For the next two weeks, Obama appeared to be recovering. Immediately after the Wright videos appeared, Clinton’s lead had widened, but after a few weeks, Obama was again gaining ground in Pennsylvania. Then came what Obama later told Matt Bai of the New York Times Magazine was “my biggest bonehead move” of the campaign.
On Sunday, April 6, Obama finished his campaigning with an evening fund-raiser in San Francisco. Most of his aides had returned to Chicago. On his own, in front of a friendly audience, Obama gave critics fresh evidence that he was out of touch with the real America. Because economic issues were now at the forefront of the campaign, Obama was trying to prove he could attract white working-class voters and appeal to those most affected by the downturn. In parts of Pennsylvania, that meant people who had been battered for years by the decline of the steel industry in the Mahoning Valley and by the contraction in the manufacturing sector. These voters saw little hope for the future and were skeptical of politicians who promised help. What he now said in San Francisco seemed to denigrate the very people he was struggling to win.
“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty-five years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama told his donors. “Each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
The fund-raiser was closed to the pre
ss. No one from the Obama campaign even had a recording of the comments. No one flagged headquarters that he had said something potentially controversial. But among those in the room was Mayhill Fowler, sixty-one, an Obama supporter and donor who was part of the Huffington Post’s “Off the Bus” reporting team of citizen journalists. The following Friday, after considerable soul-searching, she posted the remarks online. Within hours there were fifty thousand hits.
The Clinton team quickly mounted an attack to keep the controversy alive, organizing events and preparing statements for surrogates to heighten doubts about Obama. Since Ohio, Hillary had argued that she was the real champion of the beleaguered middle class, while Obama was the darling of the latte-drinkers. Now they had a vivid example and were determined to push it.
Not that they needed much help. Coming after Wright, Obama’s comments provided prime material for cable TV, raising new questions about who he was and what he believed. Was he really as elitist as his comments in San Francisco sounded? Was he so out of touch with ordinary Americans that he would dismiss their faith and culture so insensitively? The next morning, we had breakfast with Axelrod in Chicago. He was wearing sweats under his jacket. He was clearly worried, while hoping that this would prove to be a passing tempest. “You can’t assess these things as they’re happening,” he said. “But understanding this was not a helpful thing and we’ve got to dig ourselves out.” After the primaries were over, he offered this assessment: “It was mildly damaging. But it came in the same period as the Reverend Wright stuff, which I think was much more damaging. At the end of the day . . . I think he fought his way through it and I think they overplayed it.”
The Battle for America 2008 Page 25