The snippets that were being played on Fox were real doozies:
“Not God Bless America. God Damn America!”
“The USA of KKK.”
“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own backyard. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” (This right after 9/11.)
Within hours these tapes were running on all the other cables and the networks and flooding the Internet. They were inescapable. It felt like being in a madhouse.
And the worst part? We were seeing the clips for the first time. The lapse was unforgivable, and ultimately it was my failure. I knew how explosive the tapes could be and should have confirmed that every frame of the greatest threat to Obama’s candidacy had been thoroughly assessed. The press and our opponents would unquestionably go through them in detail, and throw the worst moments at us, and now it was finally happening.
We had also failed to discuss the various options we might explore vis-à-vis Wright. We never raised with Obama the idea of leaving the church, or discussed with him in any detail how we would respond if inflammatory statements were to emerge. We were in denial. In any competitive enterprise, you need to know everything your opponent knows about you and limit the number of surprises by getting out damaging information yourself before it can be used to sucker punch you. We knew this, but acted like novices.
Hour after hour, the wall of TVs in the campaign press office featured all Wright, all the time. He filled every screen, his purple robe billowing, eyes ablaze, ranting and spewing invective. I had to stop looking up at the TVs. It grew too painful.
HQ was morose. Ax and I sat in my office and tried to think of the best way to deal with this. “Maybe we just have to ride it out,” I suggested. “Be calm, make clear he disagrees with the statements and try our best to create a distance.”
“It would have been easier to distance ourselves last year,” Ax rightly replied. He was fuming that we had got caught with our pants down on this one. “But we didn’t do the damn research, so now it looks reactive. Honestly, I don’t know if we can survive this. But maybe I’m just having trouble seeing with a ton of bricks sitting on my head.”
“So far, the superdelegates are holding,” I reported. “But they’re nervous. They want to see how we handle this and if we can dig ourselves out. Before this, I thought we were a one-hundred-percent lock to get the nomination. Now I think it’s dropped to eighty percent—we could hemorrhage.”
“Really?” responded Ax, droll as always. “Because right now it feels like I’m hemorrhaging plenty.”
Our initial response to the controversy was formulaic and consistent with what we had said when asked about Wright previously.
“Let me say at the outset that I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have been the subject of this controversy,” Obama said. “I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country or serves to divide us from our allies. I also believe that words that degrade individuals have no place in our public dialogue, whether it’s on the campaign stump or in the pulpit. In sum, I reject outright the statements by Reverend Wright that are at issue.”
We also made clear Obama had not been in church when Wright made the statements being circulated. Altogether, though, it was a woefully inadequate response. We were doing due diligence and making pro forma responses, but Wright’s statements were filled with bile and hatred for America, and required a stronger comeback. Many of us have heard things from the pulpit we disagreed with, but this was far beyond the pale. It threatened to undermine the profile we had spent fifteen months building: Obama was someone who sought to and would bridge divides, a man of deep faith, a steady leader and pragmatic problem solver.
These tapes raised grave doubts in voters’ minds about that portrayal. They were hungering for more information about Obama and Wright. Did Obama hear these sermons? If so, how could he not walk out? Were these snippets par for the course for Wright or rare moments of departure? Was Wright an adviser now and someone Obama would rely on for advice?
On a call, Axelrod, Gibbs, and I pressed Obama for what he knew. “I don’t recall any of these parts of these sermons,” he said with not a little exasperation. “From time to time—and it was fairly rare—Wright would say something I thought crossed the line or was even in poor taste. I would often come up to him after and say so, and he and I would sometimes have heated disagreements. But I’m positive I never heard anything like this.”
I had assumed this was the case, but it was still relieving to hear it from him.
“I went much less frequently in recent years,” Obama continued. “And if you talk to people who attend Trinity, they will tell you he has gotten more erratic over time. But these excerpts simplify Wright. Most of his talks are about love and support and fairness. It’s a wonderful church community with a pastor who is mostly positive but can draw outside the lines sometimes.”
Armed with this information, we had to face a barrage of questions from the press. Had he been in the pew for any of these excerpts? No, we said definitively. But that raised another set of questions. Can you tell us the dates of all the services he did attend? Would he have quit the church had he heard them? What sermons had he found objectionable?
And of course rumors were flying that tapes would emerge any minute showing Obama nodding, applauding, and generally whooping it up to Wright’s inflammatory statements. This was a Grade-A shitstorm.
Our press staff could not answer these questions. Obama would have to, and pronto.
The Wright story broke on a Wednesday and exploded across the media landscape the next day. We decided Obama had to take questions about this head-on on Friday, in a series of lengthy national cable interviews.
There was one not so minor complication. He was already scheduled to do editorial boards that Friday afternoon with both Chicago papers about Tony Rezko, two hours each, no holds barred. Given no choice but to address Wright as soon as possible, we decided we would do a round of TV interviews on him directly after the Rezko boards. It shaped into quite a day, like having your legs amputated in the morning and your arms at night. The question was whether we would still have a heartbeat at the end of the day.
The Chicago papers would be loaded for bear at their sit-downs with Obama. Even though they had asked him plenty of questions about Rezko through the last year and a half, we had not given them an opportunity to poke, prod, and look for inconsistencies at length. They would put him through the paces and then some.
And we had tactically mishandled questions about Rezko, adding fuel to the fire. Because Obama had nothing to hide, we should have done this session right at the start of the campaign to lance the boil. But we stubbornly refused, too concerned about creating a negative story line. It was myopic and a mistake. Some in the press felt we were being cagey and thought, with some justification, that we must be hiding something or afraid of a full airing-out.
Obama finally got fed up and demanded we schedule the Rezko interviews, so we did. Now the Wright interviews would immediately follow. It was like asking someone to scale Mount Everest and then saying, “Nicely done, now on to Mount Kilimanjaro.” But we had no choice.
Obama came into our HQ that Friday a couple of hours before the first editorial board to prep with Ax, Gibbs, me, and Bob Bauer, our invaluable campaign attorney. We ended up doing only about fifteen minutes of Rezko prep before deciding we needed to release a fuller statement on Wright, one that might soften the blows he would get that night on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox. Obama looked at our draft statement and decided he needed to rewrite it. So as we were peppering him with the likely questions he would receive on Rezko, he was redrafting our comments on Wright.
It was chaos and, quite frankly, frightening. I felt like the wheels could easily spin off our whole venture. Still, Obama was the pillar of reassurance. “Don’t worry, guys,” he
told us while making some notes on a stack of pages, “I can do more than one thing at a time. We are taking the trash out today. It won’t be fun but we’ll be stronger for it.”
A little while later, Barack and Gibbs left for the first editorial stop at the Tribune. Bauer, Ax, and I looked at each other with trepidation. If there had been thought bubbles above our heads they would have read “We are screwed.”
But Obama handled everything with brilliance. The editorial boards, though grueling, went well. They resulted in positive editorials from both papers, which were rightly seen as the official judgment on the Rezko matter. The Rezko problem never went away completely but eventually faded in importance because Obama had faced the toughest jury on the matter and satisfied them of his innocence. His success in putting the Rezko matter to bed only underscores our error in delaying the reckoning. Clearing the air up front would have mitigated a lot of heartburn, especially in the days before the Texas and Ohio primaries.
He also handled well the additional questions the boards threw at him on Wright, partially because in Chicago the reverend was known and understood in fuller context, whereas the rest of the country knew him only from the looped snippets of venom. The hometown papers were familiar with the great ministry at Trinity and the church’s work with kids and the disadvantaged, and to them, Wright wasn’t the monster he had become across the country.
Obama went on to do a terrific job in the Wright interviews on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. But as we watched from the office, Ax and I knew that while Obama’s assurances might staunch the flow, we would continue to bleed.
Obama called me after eleven that night, while my wife and son were sleeping. As with almost every call I took, made, or participated in from home during the campaign, I spoke with him while shut into our bathroom. We had a small apartment, and it was the only room in the place where my talking would not wake my family.
All campaigners know there’s no glamour in our work; perhaps the best example of this from the Obama story is that significant parts of his presidential campaign were run or hashed out in that small, spartan bathroom. For two years, when I was not on the road, I led just about every crack-of-dawn conference call from that bathroom. When I think back on the campaign, this is the first image that comes to mind: me sitting on the lid of a commode, or pacing back and forth two steps each way, in front of the tiny bathroom mirror in that awful echo chamber. Another important lesson: if you ever run a presidential campaign, spring for an apartment with an extra room.
On this night Obama got straight to the point. “I thought the interviews went well,” he said. “What did you think?” I concurred. We both let out a breath. “So we survived,” he went on. “But it feels really unsatisfying—to me and I’m sure to voters. Wright will consume our campaign if I can’t put it into broader context. This is a moment where conventional politics needs to take a backseat. I think I need to give a speech on race and how Wright fits into that. Whether people will accept it or not, I don’t know. But I don’t think we can move forward until I try. I know you guys may disagree.”
Obama had raised giving a race speech back in the fall. At the time, Axelrod and I strenuously disagreed, believing that we should not inject into the campaign an issue that for the most part was not on voters’ minds. Now we were in a much different situation. I agreed that a traditional political move—the damage-control interviews we had done that night—would not be enough. But a speech was fraught with peril. If it was off-key it could compound our problems.
“I think that makes sense,” I told him, “but we have to work through a lot before we pull the trigger.”
He said he was calling Axelrod and that after they spoke he wanted me to call Ax and then conference him in; the three of us would make a decision. “I don’t want a big meeting or conference call on this,” he told me. “You and Ax and I will arbitrate this. But know this is what I think I need to do, so I’ll need an awfully compelling argument not to give this speech. And I think it needs to be delivered in the early part of next week and I need to write most of it.”
The logistics of pulling off the speech in a matter of days were daunting, especially considering he had very little time to work on it—his schedule was jammed, and we agreed we could not break it without generating campaign-in-freefall stories.
First, though, we had to hash through the concept. Axelrod and I spoke a few minutes later and quickly decided we were in uncharted waters. There was no playbook for how to handle something like this. It had never been done.
“He really wants to give this speech,” I concluded. “And I don’t have a better idea. Do you?”
“Nope,” said Ax. “And since he has the majority of the voting shares, we should tell him we think he should proceed. And pray that somehow we can survive.”
Ax began to fret about the real-world problems of constructing the most important speech of our candidacy largely on the fly, when I interrupted. “Look, let’s call him and walk through it,” I said. “We’ll do the speech but he has to own the reality of the time constraints.”
We conferenced Barack in. “So?” he asked. “What’s the deal?” We told him we agreed with the speech but that it was going to be hard to put it together.
“Tonight is Friday—well, Saturday morning,” I said. “We have to give this speech no later than Tuesday. You have a full schedule in Pennsylvania the next three days. It has already been publicized. If we start canceling events it will fuel the impression that we’re panicked and our candidacy is on the rocks.”
“No, we can’t cancel anything,” Obama interjected, “but I already know what I want to say in this speech. I’ve been thinking about it for almost thirty years. I’ll call Favs in the morning and give him some initial guidance. And I’ll work on this during downtime in the hotel room each night. Don’t worry. Even if I have to pull all-nighters, I can make this work.”
We were flying by the seat of our pants. Somehow we had to keep faith that it would come together.
Obama asked if he should come home to Chicago to give the speech. I said no, we shouldn’t break stride, and raised the prospect of giving it at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, which I had visited with my wife shortly after it opened in 2003. “I assume you’ll talk about race from a historical context, and the Constitution Center sets that tone,” I argued. “It’s as good a backdrop as we’re going to get for addressing the weaving of our racial history.”
Obama and Ax liked this idea, and we decided to move forward. Tuesday morning. Philadelphia. An as-yet-unwritten speech that would likely determine the future of our candidacy.
Monday morning, Michelle called me. It was very rare for her to express an opinion on something like a venue, but she had some concerns regarding the location we had picked. “I think Barack needs to be in a bigger setting for the speech,” she told me. “He needs to see supportive faces and to be boosted. The Constitutional Center sounds great in theory, but it can only fit about a hundred people after the press is accounted for. We need energy and fight and passion, not something that will come across as a dry lecture.”
I understood where she was coming from. This was going to be the most raw and important moment of her husband’s political life. Of course the instinct would be to seek as hospitable and uplifting a setting as possible.
But we thought setting this speech at a rally, where people would be applauding and boisterous, could create an unwanted sense of distance from his real audience, the American people, when he needed more than ever for them to feel personally his sincerity and desire to connect. This needed to be a sober speech, and we needed a crowd to match.
I double-checked with Alyssa and with Anita Dunn, who by now had taken on an über role overseeing communications planning and research, to see if they thought we were making a mistake going with the Constitution Center. They strongly thought we needed to stick with the plan. So I went back to Michelle and laid out why, her reservations notwithstanding, we thought the
NCC made the most sense in terms of location and size.
Michelle was very good in moments like this. She didn’t raise many questions about the campaign broadly, but when she did, it was with good reason. Once she determined we had worked things through thoroughly, she was generally satisfied, and that was the case now. We were on for the Constitution Center.
I did not see the speech until Obama e-mailed it to Ax, Favs, and me very early the day it was to be given. It was stirring, and while I doubted it would put Wright to rest entirely, I thought it should be received very well in all quarters and give us some room to move forward with the campaign. Ax wrote Obama a one-line e-mail response: “This is why you should be President.”
Whatever the reaction of the rest of the country, our campaign staff agreed with Ax. As we watched the speech from Chicago HQ, all other activity ceased; our bus depot of an office fell totally silent. Many on our team were crying. We had varied backgrounds but were all deeply proud to be working for this man. Though most of us over twenty-five, and certainty those over thirty, had worked on many campaigns and had become hardened operatives, we still shared a certain idealism. Our candidate was living up to our expectations not just for him, but for any leader. Instead of talking down to the country, or ducking one of our nation’s toughest issues, he wrapped himself in it, took a step back, and tried to give us all some context. His goal was not simply to mitigate political damage, but to try and raise our discourse.
The speech received rave reviews from political commentators and spawned hundreds of positive editorials. The Dallas Morning News put it this way: “Has any major U.S. politician in modern times ever given a speech about race in America as unflinching, human and ultimately hopeful as the one Barack Obama delivered yesterday? Whether or not the speech satisfies critics of Mr. Obama’s close relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, this remarkable address was one for the history books.”
The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory Page 28